tag:theconversation.com,2011:/columns/cogito-377Cogito – The Conversation2017-11-13T11:49:56Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/873672017-11-13T11:49:56Z2017-11-13T11:49:56ZAlexander Dugin, Eurasianism, and the American election<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/194309/original/file-20171113-27635-s5of56.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=496&amp;fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Alexander Dugin: the philosopher or prophet who has been touted as &#39;Putin s brain&#39;.</span> </figcaption></figure><h2>Electoral affinities</h2>
<p>Until the last fortnight, an unhappy sequence of natural disasters and North Korean sabre-rattling have kept the investigations concerning Russian interference in last year’s American election out of the international headlines. </p>
<p>At issue, the world knows, is the existence, nature and extent of this alleged interference. Then there is the possible collusion in it of people close to Mr Trump and his bid for the Oval Office. </p>
<p>Commentators consider less often why the Russian government might want to intervene in the US elections in favour of a candidate appealing to forms of Americanism long married to depictions of their own nation as heading an “evil empire”.</p>
<p>To be sure, the times have changed. The Iron Curtain has fallen. Putin is a former KGB man. And reading dissidents like <a href="https://www.thechicagocouncil.org/event/winter-coming-garry-kasparov-putins-grand-strategy">Garry Kasparov</a> is an education in how his government continues the darker legacies of Soviet rule. But the ideological foundations of the new regime are very different.</p>
<p>We can get an idea of the kind of thinking at stake here by looking at the thought of the philosopher sometimes (inevitably) dubbed “<a href="http://bigthink.com/paul-ratner/the-dangerous-philosopher-behind-putins-strategy-to-grow-russian-power-at-americas-expense">Putin’s Rasputin</a>”, Alexander Dugin.</p>
<p>Dugin’s relationship with Putin and his inner circles has changed over time. Its extent is contested. <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/article/380614/dugins-evil-theology-robert-zubrin">Certainly</a>, both men came to maturity within the former Soviet Russia. Both men were shocked at the regime’s collapse. Both rued Russia’s ensuing fall from superpower status. Both men are now committed to ‘making Russia great again’. </p>
<p>Dugin thus came out publicly in favour of Putin’s controversial 2008 invasion of Georgia. During the 2014 Russia-Ukraine conflict, he bullishly called for the annexation of all Ukrainian lands that were part of the former Russian Empire.</p>
<p>And in 2015-16, Dugin vocally championed Mr Trump’s Presidential bid in the US. Trump, the philosopher <a href="http://katehon.com/article/russian-geopolitician-trump-real-america">enthused</a>, is “tough, rough … rude, emotional and, apparently, candid”. Despite being a billionaire, Trump embodied the “real” America, in heroic insurgency against the “globalist” beltway elites. </p>
<p>But Dugin’s virtual vote for Trump in 2016, and his <a href="https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2014/5/1/1296283/-Alexander-Dugin-Open-Letter-to-American-People-on-Ukraine">new-found concern</a> for the American heartland, come tethered to a decidedly ‘un-American’ worldview, to turn another phrase. </p>
<p>“It is especially important to introduce geopolitical disorder into internal American activity,” Dugin was advising Russian elites as early as <a href="https://www.kottke.org/17/06/putins-playbook-for-discrediting-america-and-destabilizing-the-west">the 1990s</a>, laying out what looks like a blueprint for the kinds of activities presently under CIA investigation:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>encouraging all kinds of separatism and ethnic, social and racial conflicts, actively supporting all dissident movements – extremist, racist, and sectarian groups, thus destabilizing internal political processes in the US. It would also make sense simultaneously to support isolationist tendencies in American politics …</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Almost as soon as you rub the bottle, in fact, the elective affinities between Dugin’s support for Messrs Trump and Putin begin to give way to asymmetries of global proportions. </p>
<p>For if the isolationism of the American superpower is to be encouraged, for Dugin and those who follow him, this is to clear the ground for a newly-interventionist imperial Russia. </p>
<h2>Impact and philosophy</h2>
<p>In Western nations, there is much talk presently about the need for philosophy to “impact” wider societies. But there is impact and there is impact. In truth, philosophers have a long but highly ambiguous history of “impacting” wider culture which Alexander Dugin continues. </p>
<p>On the one hand, political regimes have always called upon philosophical or religious legitimations, particularly in times of crisis. Philosophers have sometimes obliged them, by writing on directly political subjects. </p>
<p>On the other hand, philosophers from Socrates onwards have been in the business of questioning accepted communal pieties, often at their own peril. One lineage beginning with Plato has thus seen philosophers repeatedly attracted to forms of tyrannical government. For <a href="https://books.google.com.au/books/about/On_Tyranny.html?id=puxRXDxS5TMC&amp;redir_esc=y">in these regimes</a>, their controversial wisdom can directly shape policy, by-passing any need to court popular consent.</p>
<p>The most influential 20th century figure in this lineage of ‘Platonic political philosophy’ is Alexander Dugin’s philosophical hero, the German philosopher Martin Heidegger. </p>
<p>“A different, special, exclusive place in the history of philosophy that can be set aside for Heidegger should be recognized,” <a href="http://4pt.su/fi/node/1723">Dugin has proclaimed</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>in the case that we fully trust Heidegger, immerse ourselves in his thinking, and make him our highest authority, … even in the event that his deeds went beyond the accepted norms of common morals. Geniuses are forgiven by everyone.</p>
</blockquote>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/194312/original/file-20171113-27612-1nx4dmc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=754&amp;fit=clip">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Martin Heidegger, about the extent of whose Nazi engagement scholars continue to learn.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In the early 1930s, the philosopher had looked to Adolf Hitler and the National Socialists to enable not simply the renewal of a defeated, depleted and divided Germany. <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Heidegger-Introduction-Philosophy-Unpublished-1933-1935/dp/0300172079">Heidegger had hoped</a> that his own philosophy of Being could “lead the [new] leaders” and inspire a “second beginning” to Western thought and culture more widely. </p>
<p>At issue in the advent of Nazi rule, in the philosopher’s <a href="http://www.iupress.indiana.edu/product_info.php?products_id=807954">ponderings</a>, was nothing short of a total “overcoming” of the modern world, in both its liberal-democratic and communist forms.</p>
<p>Heidegger’s post-war reception in the liberal nations has been predicated on an increasingly-untenable denial of the extent and significance of his Nazism.</p>
<p>Alexander Dugin is unhindered by any residual liberal-democratic loyalties. He castigates much of this Western reception of Heidegger as an understandable but regrettable “<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Martin-Heidegger-Philosophy-Another-Beginning/dp/1593680376">caricature</a>.” </p>
<p>For Dugin, it is precisely Heidegger’s <a href="http://www.persee.fr/doc/arss_0335-5322_1975_num_1_5_2485">translation into a philosophical idiom</a> of many leading motifs of the reactionary European milieu that legitimised Nazism’s rise, which makes him essential reading today—at least for thoughtful Russians.</p>
<p>Western philosophers have since Socrates mostly seen reason as the means to temper the passions, balancing their imperious demands against larger considerations. Reasoning of different kinds has also been cultivated by philosophers to enable people to discern the often obscure or hidden natures of things, and their causes.</p>
<p>For Dugin as for Heidegger, by contrast, rationality less uncovers the truth of things than <em>uproots</em> its adherents from the true sources of existential significance which reveal themselves through other, more primordial means. </p>
<p>Dugin for his part thus <a href="http://www.4pt.su/el/node/1723">enthusiastically embraces</a> Heidegger’s monolithic depiction of the course of Western culture after Socrates as one of unending decline, ending in today’s gilded but ‘nihilistic’ age. </p>
<p>“The contemporary West is universal, but in the way that decomposition and death are universal,” <a href="http://www.4pt.su/el/node/1723">the Russian thinker ponders</a>. “Heidegger saw the most profound form of this degeneracy in ‘Americanism’, which he thought of as ‘planetarism’ (today we would say ‘globalism’ and ‘globalization’).” </p>
<p>If the tenor of these sayings already sounds as much prophetic as philosophical, this is not by chance. <a href="http://www.4pt.su/el/node/1723">For Dugin</a>, “Heidegger is … an eschatological figure, … the final interpreter … of the deepest and most enigmatic themes of world philosophy and the creator of a radically new thinking.”</p>
<p>This radically new thinking saw <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Heideggers-Roots-Nietzsche-National-Socialism/dp/0801440726">Heidegger postulate</a>, on the basis of an alleged linguistic connection between modern German and the preclassical Greek, that a second, postmodern beginning of the West could spring only from the German <em>volk</em>, its leaders, thinker(s) and poets. </p>
<p>Heidegger’s Germanism might then seem to pose a sizeable problem for a Russian ethno-nationalist like Dugin. But the latter’s fidelity to Heidegger sees him proposing to carry the German thinker’s anti-modernist project forwards, by relocating it on different “Indo-European”, Slavic or Russian soil.</p>
<p>For Dugin, the “putrefaction” of the West diagnosed by Heidegger meant that Nazism could not break out from modernity. One needed to look further East: to the untapped telluric riches of the Russian <em>narodi</em> (very roughly, “people”) and its language. Dugin’s post-Heideggerian package even <a href="http://www.4pt.su/el/node/1723">comes complete</a> with a proposed reanimation of an idealised, specifically Russian antiquity:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Perhaps it is the very time to take part in the process of real philosophizing and to unseal the virgin treasure of Slavic, Russian speech for the creation of new meanings and new intellectual horizons, based on newly interpreted [or “comprehended”] Russian antiquity.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>What Russia needs, <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/article/380614/dugins-evil-theology-robert-zubrin">says Dugin</a>, is a “genuine, true, radically revolutionary and consistent, fascist fascism.” Its horizon is nothing less than what political theorist Eric Voegelin called the “immanentizing of the eschaton”. As Dugin <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/article/380614/dugins-evil-theology-robert-zubrin">directly enjoins</a> us:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The end times and the eschatological meaning of politics will not realize themselves on their own. We will wait for the end in vain … If the Fourth Political Practice is not able to realize the end of times, then it would be invalid. The end of days should come, but it will not come by itself. This is a task, it is not a certainty. It is an active metaphysics. It is a practice.</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>From the end of the world to Eurasianism and back again</h2>
<p>As unlikely as it may sound, then, Dugin’s prophetic prognostications about bringing on the end of the world have practical geopolitical corollaries. </p>
<p>If Dugin has influenced on the military elites surrounding Putin, indeed, it is not primarily based on his Russian refitting of the recondite motifs of the German conservative revolutionaries. It is largely on the basis of Dugin’s 1997 work, <a href="https://www.kottke.org/17/06/putins-playbook-for-discrediting-america-and-destabilizing-the-west">The Foundation of Geopolitics</a>. </p>
<p>According to both <a href="http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/07/27/geopolitics-russia-mackinder-eurasia-heartland-dugin-ukraine-eurasianism-manifest-destiny-putin/">Foreign Policy</a> and the thinker himself, The Foundation of Geopolitics is required reading at Russian military academies.</p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/194314/original/file-20171113-27635-ad1g7h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=754&amp;fit=clip">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Dugin s Foundations of Geopolitics a blueprint for a new Russian imperialism.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The book sets out a vast vision of a future, land-based Eurasian bloc. This empire <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/article/380614/dugins-evil-theology-robert-zubrin">will be led</a> by “ethnic Russians” and span all the nations from Dublin to Vladisvostok. </p>
<p>“The repudiation of the empire-building function,” Dugin <a href="http://www.bloggen.be/kitokojungle/archief.php?ID=1258040">warns</a> his fellows, “would signify the end of the Russian people as a … civilizational phenomenon. Such a repudiation would be tantamount to national suicide”.</p>
<p>In an evocative choice of words, Dugin thus proposes the formation of <a href="http://www.bloggen.be/kitokojungle/archief.php?ID=1258040">three “axes”</a> between Moscow-Berlin, Moscow-Tokyo, and Moscow-Teheran. </p>
<p>The means whereby such axes should be created are not necessarily military. Dugin rather calls for a combination of subversion and disinformation by the Russian special services (as above), the strategic use of Russia’s natural resources (notably, gas and oil), and the destabilisation of the American-led global order. </p>
<p>Within Europe, Dugin advises that:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>[t]he task of Moscow is to tear Europe away from the control of the U.S. (NATO), to assist European unification, and to strengthen ties with Central Europe under the aegis of the fundamental external axis Moscow-Berlin. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Readers can see here why Dugin might have warmed to Mr Trump’s petering 2016 promises to shelve NATO, leaving aside any alleged philosopher’s love for the ‘real’, anti-liberal America.</p>
<p>The fact that liberal-democratic nations like Germany, France or Japan might seem unlikely to assume their roles in Dugin’s Russian-led Eurasian empire is an obstacle, not a roadblock. These nations must be prodded into becoming less liberal, and less bound to their cross-Atlantic ally. </p>
<p>“In Germany and France,” Dugin advises, “there is a firm anti-Atlanticist tradition …” This tradition is embodied in ethno-nationalist movements like Marine Le Pen’s Front Nationale, whose cause Dugin urges Russia to promote by all means. </p>
<p>Readers can see here a script for the alleged Russian interference in now-President Macron’s 2017 election campaign, leaving aside any newfound love of the philosopher for a ‘real’, non-republican France.</p>
<p>Besides, in another leitmotif of the far Right, “the principle of a common enemy” should be played upon to cement new Eurasian alliances. </p>
<p>At the basis of Dugin’s geopolitical thought, that is, we find a further <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/article/380614/dugins-evil-theology-robert-zubrin">metapolitical mythology</a>. This time it is drawn less from Martin Heidegger than kindred thinkers like Karl Haushofer, Carl Schmitt, and Arthur Moeller van den Bruck.</p>
<p>According to this mythology, all human history has involved a primordial, nigh-Manichean conflict between sea-faring civilizations—which are characteristically more open, but also expansionist and dynamic—and more closed, existentially “rooted”, land-based <em>narodi</em>.</p>
<p>The forces of the former Dugin calls “Atlanticist”, and associates today with the US and the UK (America’s “extraterritorial floating base”). The rightful champion of the forces of the latter, called upon presently to cast down “Atlanticism” in the coming global struggle which will end the world as we know it, is of course Mr Putin’s revitalised Russia.</p>
<p>When the Cause is so Great, buying the odd deceptive <a href="http://www.news.com.au/finance/business/media/we-got-paid-to-advertise-fake-news-during-us-election-facebook-admits/news-story/8d6d43e862bb104352249429f3f8799e">Facebook advertisement</a> in roubles, or hacking the odd Democratic email account is very small fare indeed.</p>
<h2>“Carthage must be destroyed”?</h2>
<p>But do Vladimir Putin and his senior aides buy into the tenets of Alexander Dugin’s extraordinary vision - one which seems to have proven prophetic at least about suspected Russian interference in several recent Western elections? </p>
<p>This is less clear.</p>
<p>With <a href="http://www.4pt.su/es/node/445">characteristic moderation</a>, the thinker himself celebrated Mr Putin’s November 2000 claim that “Russia has always perceived of itself as a Eurasian country.” This was, for the philosopher, nothing less than “an epochal, grandiose revolutionary admission which, in general, changes everything … There will be a Eurasian millennium.”</p>
<p>However that may be, viewers of the extraordinary 2015-16 interviews between <a href="http://www.oliverstone.com/the-putin-interviews/">Mr Putin and filmmaker Oliver Stone</a> might have been surprised at how, when describing the staunchly anti-Russian, American Senator John McCain, the Russian President evoked a celebrated episode from the <em>West</em>’s classical past.</p>
<p>McCain was like the Roman Senator Cato the Elder, Putin said. For Cato would finish every speech by declaiming grimly that Carthage, Rome’s seafaring rival, “must be destroyed”.</p>
<p>Putin then criticised McCain and this brand of patriotism, but his discordant Roman moment stuck with me. I only later discovered that Cato’s “<em>Carthago delenda est</em>” is not simply a saying that readers can find repeated on many a Right-wing blog or ‘under the line’ on web-published articles today—where it prompts us to picture America as the new Carthage, set against Russia as the incipient new Rome. </p>
<p>It is also the epigraph of the Eurasianist website <a href="https://www.geopolitica.ru/en">geopolitica.ru</a>, on which Alexander Dugin’s “guidelines”, “directives”, lectures and interviews can be openly viewed.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/87367/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<h4 class="double-bordered">Disclosure</h4><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Matthew Sharpe works for Deakin Univerisity. He has previously received funding from the ARC to look at religion and political thought, and has previously published on radical conservative thinkers. </span></em></p>Alexander Diugin ("Putin's brain") justifies far-reaching Russian interferene in Western democracies, on the basis of a radical neofascist worldview-and his views are being taken very seriously.Matthew Sharpe, Associate Professor in Philosophy, Deakin UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/835932017-09-15T05:18:54Z2017-09-15T05:18:54ZRe: emails - should laugh and cry at the same thing?<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/186154/original/file-20170915-16324-153bs7v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=496&amp;fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">An emoji laughing so hard s/he is crying (or visa versa)</span> </figcaption></figure><p>The great French philosopher Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592) has an essay “<a href="https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/m/montaigne/michel/essays/book1.37.html">That we laugh and cry at the same thing</a>.” It is one of his many <a href="https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/m/montaigne/michel/essays/">Essays</a> that revel in pointing out the manifold irrationalities of we humans, ‘the rational animals’.</p>
<p>Montaigne’s philosophical star is presently not on the ascendant. But this sceptical ironist and astute observer of all things human has <a href="theconversation.com/guide-to-the-classics-michel-de-montaignes-essays-63508">a real claim</a> to being one of the most influential of Western thinkers.</p>
<p>There is in fact scarcely a rule that a reader can think of that Montaigne doesn’t delight in producing exceptions for. That’s often the best bit. </p>
<p>It is therefore worthwhile to think, but hard to say what Montaigne would have thought about <a href="www.nethistory.info%20%E2%80%BA%20Ian%20Peter's%20History%20of%20the%20Internet">emails</a>; these electronic prodigies, scarcely two decades old, which can already lay claim to moving most of the world and bringing down at least <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillary_Clinton_email_controversy">one prospective President</a>. </p>
<p>I can only suppose that Montaigne would have suggested that, here as elsewhere, there are good reasons why we should laugh and cry at the same thing.</p>
<h2>Genre bender</h2>
<p>Some people have compared Montaigne’s <a href="https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/m/montaigne/michel/essays/complete.html#book2.12">Essays</a> to the first blog. I’m not aware of anyone suggesting emails. A charming raconteur, Montaigne probably tells us more about himself and his foibles than any writer before him, and almost everyone before the advent of social media.</p>
<p>At least one of his essays is cast as a letter to a female friend. Emails are like letters too, in some ways, if it is a question of situating them in the history of forms of written culture. </p>
<p>We sometimes after all still address emails formally: “Dear …” and close them with a “yours sincerely”, “with best regards”, etc. Yet they are not quite letters, at least as anyone knew them before circa 2000 CE. </p>
<p>Sometimes people don’t address or sign emails at all, especially when they are on a hand-held device or in a rush. In some exchanges, again, you start formally and then end three or four “replies” later by dropping the pleasantries, before renewing them in a new chain. </p>
<p>Then there’s all the gradations in between formality and zero: “best, b” or just ‘- h" and, more and more, the automated signature.</p>
<p>There’s not usually then quite such a custom of formality in an email as in a letter. Yet emails on some subjects within organisations demand a formal mode of writing. </p>
<p>Someone recently was relating that some organisations now insist on “brand-sanctioned” language in employees’ emails, although I’m not sure Montaigne would credit it.</p>
<p>Nevertheless, often emails are riddled with grammatical errors and typological infelicities. Deciphering them at the other end is like reading a cryptic code. </p>
<p>It has always been possible to forward a letter you have received onwards to other recipients, even recipients who weren’t originally addressed. That was, admittedly, fairly unusual, outside of political contexts. But that is much easier than ever now. And it is possible, thinking of Montaigne, to imagine situations when this becomes more a matter of tears than of laughter.</p>
<p>So perhaps someone will accordingly say that, actually, it is not letters but <em><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Post_Card:_From_Socrates_to_Freud_and_Beyond">postcards</a></em> that emails more closely resemble. Anything written in an email is not private, like the old picture postcard.</p>
<p>Some wise voices thus suggest a “blackboard rule” (don’t write it down unless you could leave it on a blackboard). This implies near-perfect publicity. But mostly, when people speak or write for the public, they take care to get the grammar and spelling right. </p>
<p>Users sign in to email servers with a protected password, and many of their receipts for private transactions are now, more or less necessarily, linked to email accounts. So the idea that emails are the postmodern postcards doesn’t quite fit the bill either. </p>
<p>Are emails then unprecedented? </p>
<p>Some people keep all their written correspondence for many years. We should be grateful that figures like Goethe, Diderot or Voltaire made a habit of it. </p>
<p>But the emails of all we lesser mortals are automatically recorded and stored by the internet provider and sundry parties for up to seven years. Whereas even love can be passing, like Sigmund Freud’s unconscious, <a href="https://michaelhyatt.com/e-mail-etiquette-101.html">emails are forever</a>.</p>
<p>Perhaps then the better model is the “<a href="http://cscs.res.in/courses_folder/dataarchive/textfiles/textfile.2011-12-30.8604273949/file">mystic writing pad</a>” that fascinated the same Sigmund Freud as a possible model for the mind. </p>
<p>These are the kinds of wax tablets that kids can write on by depressing a thin film, layered over said tablet, with a point. When the film is lifted, what was last written on the film is removed. A clean slate materialises. </p>
<p>But what was inscribed on the wax is recorded for as long as the wax lasts.<br>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/186156/original/file-20170915-16314-1fcj8nd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=754&amp;fit=clip">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A wax writing pad like that which fascinated Freud as a model for the mind.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure></p>
<p>Yet you can’t unsend or ‘lift away’ a sent email (there’s actually a line of email-circulated jokes about this sort of thing). Indeed, on this thought, human beings have never previously had the power, by clicking a single button marked “reply all”, to post a letter simultaneously to an entire circle of people who they didn’t mean to post it to. </p>
<p>That is another ‘affordance’ of emails that I think Montaigne would find both tragic and comic at the same time. </p>
<h2>Inconvenient conveniences</h2>
<p>But emails, truly, are very convenient. They are so convenient as to be practically unavoidable. Who needs to walk down a corridor or across a city block, let alone pick up a phone, when you can email, more immediately, and to the same effect?</p>
<p>—Except that it often is not “to the same effect”. </p>
<p>Emails have features that, truly, resemble a spoken conversation. Almost instantaneous exchanges are possible, and we’ve seen informality too. Yet emails are not quite conversations, any more than they are quite letters, postcards, or mystic writing pads.</p>
<p>For a start, emails are written. There is a timeless, vexing problem with writing, identified by the Greek philosopher <a href="http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0174%3Atext%3DPhaedrus%3Apage%3D274">Plato long ago</a>. Written texts communicate. But they always communicate the same thing. And they don’t come with their own interpretation manual. </p>
<p>Moreover, written words can never convey all the unsaid dimensions of language, like intonation, eye contact, or body language.</p>
<p>So emails, like all writings, are famously prone to being misunderstood. In a way that would make <a href="https://books.google.com.au/books/about/Dissemination.html?id=m8lmHmVW12EC&amp;redir_esc=y">Jacques Derrida</a> laugh, they disseminate all sorts of unintended significations beyond the author’s best intentions. </p>
<p>Who has not heard stories of emails that have been taken the wrong way, like the proverbial joke in bad taste?</p>
<p>Lately, evidently realising Plato was on to something, some e-mailers have introduced pictorial <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoji">emojis</a> at the end of sentences to make their readers clear about their good intentions. </p>
<p>But a smiling emoji at the end of a sentence can look like <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/24/study-using-emojis-in-a-work-email-makes-you-seem-incompetent.html">protesting too much</a>, to cite a near-contemporary of Montaigne’s. </p>
<p>True, at least with an email you can respond, send a follow-up to clarify, or reply to replies. This makes the situation not quite the same as that which Plato envisaged for deaf, dumb and repetitive writing. But Montaigne might point to other seeming inconveniences that attend emails, near neighbours to their conveniencies.</p>
<p>With the advent if the i-phone, emails have after all fast become like close friends or family members. You take them everywhere. Then again, they are also – like friends and family members, <em>who you can’t ever quite leave behind</em>. </p>
<p>Just two holiday button clicks of your ‘device’ away, you can find yourself in effect back in the workplace: the same workplace that just now you were dreaming of leaving behind this untroubled horizon, a couple of flights and weeks away.</p>
<p>Unless you turn the alerts off, emails will even buzz in your pocket. It is as if you were a surgeon on call, urgently needed to attend to the latest e-sale or list-advertisement from people you’ve never met.</p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/185085/original/file-20170907-8341-10zujx7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=754&amp;fit=clip">
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<span class="caption">Michel de Montaigne as the first blogger.</span>
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<p>With that said, on the other end of the “too close-too far” spectrum, there is the agony of the unrequited email: comic from the outside, heartrending from the inside. </p>
<p>In the old days, a letter would take days or weeks to reach its addressee. You could calculate for the delay. This delay would also have to be doubled by the time needed for return post. <em>That</em> was peace of mind. </p>
<p>But emails bring with them an expectation of instant availability. So how soon should you send a “chaser” email if someone doesn’t respond? <em>Is an hour, a day, a week, or two weeks too long? Or too short?</em> </p>
<p>Then again, is it actually rude not to respond to an email? If we follow the comparison with a conversation, then yes. You can’t just not respond to someone without being rude. But if we follow the letter analogy, letters were always a more open affair. It’s another grey zone.</p>
<p>So how should you phrase the “<a href="https://www.hubspot.com/sales/follow-up-email">chaser</a>” email (read: “please reply, give me anything!”), let’s say two weeks later? Should you be serious or playful, cite uncertainty as to delivery or receipt, some fault of your own, or the possibility of some other mischance? </p>
<p>Whichever you choose, the chaser email might be the right time for an emoji with a smiling face or, obeying the law of opposites, an emoji with a thin wire of smoke curling out of its ears. </p>
<p>With all that said, the idea of sending an email with an “acknowledge receipt” seems to me too mistrustful. Policy recommends caution, but it also recommends discretion. When you acknowledge receipt in these cases, something of the liberty of the exchange is sent back with the acknowledgement. </p>
<p>And now there’s no excuse: the clock is ticking on your reply. </p>
<h2>Lucretius’ law</h2>
<p>So, what would Montaigne have made of emails? <a href="http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/montaigne-essays-of-montaigne-vol-3#lf0963-03_head_004">Somewhere</a> he claims never to have been the best letter-writer, since his style was too open, humorous and unaffected. </p>
<p>Socratic irony aside, that alleged fact, and Montaigne’s endless stories and examples might have made him a quite extraordinary emailer to ‘cc’ in, whenever possible.</p>
<p>I think Montaigne would revel in the paradoxes and vexations with come with our e-enlightenment, as if anything human was likely to avoid them. Laughter is in order. </p>
<p>Then again, one of the Roman heroes whose words Montaigne had at his fingertips, the poet <a href="http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/carus-on-the-nature-of-things">Lucretius already noted</a> in his great poem On the Nature of Things (1st century BCE, just before Caesar and Christ) that every human technological advance is ambivalent. </p>
<p>Technical devices will never deliver us from inconveniences and ambiguities. Each novelty is likely to create its own, as it solves older problems. And every new affordance, at base, can be used for purposes of peace and war, creation and destruction, love and hatred, envy and gratitude: indeed, per Montaigne, lamentation as well as laughter. </p>
<p>I imagine a Montaigne emoji written into some enlightened email program of the future. It would warn users, with a gentle smile and directive finger: <em>always be very careful before you press “send”, and just for the moment, leave “reply all” well alone.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/83593/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<h4 class="double-bordered">Disclosure</h4><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Matthew Sharpe works for Deakin. He has received funding from the Australian research Council for work on philosophy as a way of life.</span></em></p>Emails are here to stay, even if they knock down the odd Presidential aspirant or two. But that does not prevent us from thinking about their many ambivalencies.Matthew Sharpe, Associate Professor in Philosophy, Deakin UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/837772017-09-11T05:30:00Z2017-09-11T05:30:00ZSame-Sex Marriage: A Case for "Yes"<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/185364/original/file-20170910-32321-9kbcmv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=496&amp;fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption"></span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Guillaume Paumier/Flickr </span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>In its decision last week, the High Court of Australia cleared the way for a voluntary survey of the electorate to gauge community support for same-sex marriage. I don’t defend this idea: a voluntary survey is an unreliable instrument at best, and in any event providing for same-sex marriage is an issue that could be settled by an ordinary parliamentary vote without unusual steps such as a plebiscite or a national survey.</p>
<p>Still, the survey will go ahead whether I prefer it to or not. It will ask us whether we support same-sex marriage. I’ll reply “Yes” and I urge others to do the same.</p>
<p>This need not be an issue that divides (small-l) liberals like me and realistic conservatives. Conservatism has its place. It stands as a barrier to revolutionary, perhaps irresponsible, change. Liberalism acts as a needed social force pushing back against restrictions of individual liberty. Conservatives and liberals don’t have to disagree on every single issue.</p>
<p>In this case, continued denial of same-sex marriage would be illiberal, but it also goes against the best instincts of conservatives. Admittedly, some conservatives will never accept same-sex marriage because they wish to impose a traditional Christian moral code on the wider community. Note, however, that this is more reactionary and theocratic than merely conservative.</p>
<p>Conservatives who are understandably wary of sudden, irresponsible change can acknowledge that same-sex marriage’s time has come. Many, I think, are already coming to that view and I hope they’ll continue to speak up.</p>
<p>Same-sex marriage is no longer a revolutionary idea or even a novelty. Many other countries, such as the United Kingdom, the United States of America, and even the staunchly Catholic nation of Ireland, have increasingly provided for same-sex marriage, and Australia has become an outlier among Western liberal democracies. The experience in other countries provides ample evidence that extending marriage to same-sex couples is not an irresponsible step. It can be workable and need not harm the social fabric.</p>
<p>More fundamentally, same-sex marriage makes sense because marriage itself has changed over the past two hundred years - and especially over the past fifty years or so - along with its social meaning.</p>
<p>Times do change. During the 1960s and 1970s - the era of the Sexual Revolution and the phase of modern feminism associated with the Women’s Liberation Movement - genuinely revolutionary ideas about sex marriage were in vogue. The institution of marriage was subjected to fundamental criticism, and, to be frank, it was largely deserved.</p>
<p>Marriage, as it was understood and practised in European Christendom and its colonial offshoots, had a dubious history. It functioned as a form of social, and especially sexual, control. In particular, it constricted the sexuality of women. More generally, unreformed marriage was a blatantly patriarchal institution. Writing in the 1860s, John Stuart Mill identified the marriage bond as a form of slavery for women. He was not far wrong.</p>
<p>To play its role, marriage operated as licence for sexual experience, which was otherwise forbidden by morality if not by law. Standards of chastity were, of course, applied far more harshly to women than to men. Among the wealthier classes, marriage also operated as a tool for economic ends such as estate planning. From the viewpoint of sixties-and-seventies radicals, there was much about marriage that was far from romantic and did not deserve to be sentimentalised. Like Mill a century earlier, they had point.</p>
<p>Yet, marriage had already changed and softened from what it once had been. There was a long process through the 1800s and the first half of the twentieth century that improved the legal situation of women and altered the ideal of marriage far more toward one of companionship between equals. Under a range of social pressures, marriage has continued in that direction.</p>
<p>Marriage has become a kinder and far more flexible concept than it was in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, or even the 1960s. This came about in the context of a grand social compromise, not necessarily imagined by anybody in advance, where marriage’s importance was largely preserved even as its character and ground rules changed. The current ideal of marriage in Western democracies is an equal union between two companions, involving love and intimacy. Often, it even lives up to that ideal.</p>
<p>Same-sex marriage became increasingly more thinkable during the 1980s and thereafter until the idea is not at all revolutionary. The impetus came, in large part, from the 1981 AIDS crisis, but the idea of marriage for same-sex couples was able to gain traction because marriage itself had been changing in an accommodating way. Broadening the scope of marriage to include same-sex couples is now a coherent and attractive proposition. Indeed, younger people who were born after the AIDS crisis and have grown up with the contemporary ideal of marriage find the exclusion of same-sex couples incomprehensible.</p>
<p>The changing ideal of marriage has been very significant, but it happened sufficiently gradually for Western societies to adapt around it. Provision by Australian law for same-sex marriages will give effect to a concept of marriage that meets contemporary social reality and keeps the institution relevant. Far from undermining marriage as a cherished social institution, same-sex marriage will tend to strengthen it. It will show marriage as still socially relevant, as adaptable to the needs and values of 21st-century Australians.</p>
<p>At the same time, the trend in Western countries toward recognition of same-sex marriage is not entirely a social defeat for conservatives. I urge them - those who have not already done so - to embrace the idea as one they can live with and even take some comfort from.</p>
<p>Marriage continues to maintain social prestige, and it retains deep emotional significance for most citizens, including many gay men and lesbians. Once they shed their aversion to homosexuality itself - as they increasingly have - realistic conservatives can take comfort that marriage is something that so many gay men and lesbians actually want.</p>
<p>Our choice as voters over the coming months is to accept a genuinely modern ideal of marriage - and thus base policy upon it - or to affirm a much older concept of marriage that younger people find irrelevant and has relatively little community support. The latter would bring marriage into disrepute.</p>
<p>More and more conservatives have grasped that the continuing importance of marriage is in many ways a victory for their viewpoint, and that there are other issues around which they can continue to define themselves. At this point, resistance to the idea of same-sex marriage has become somewhat absurd, even by the lights of these clued-up conservatives.</p>
<p>Marriage itself has changed, along with its social meaning. It’s time to accept that not-so-harsh reality, whatever our views might be on other political issues. The trend in Western countries toward recognition of same-sex marriage is not entirely a social defeat for conservatives, and I urge them, in particular, to embrace what is happening. Almost all Australians, liberal-minded or realistically conservative, now have good reason to vote “Yes”.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/83777/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<h4 class="double-bordered">Disclosure</h4><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Russell Blackford is a Fellow of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies and is associated with the Center for Inquiry.</span></em></p>Same-sex marriage is no longer a revolutionary idea or even a novelty. Liberal-minded voters and realistic conservatives alike should see that its time has come.Russell Blackford, Conjoint Lecturer in Philosophy, University of NewcastleLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/809862017-07-13T13:00:10Z2017-07-13T13:00:10ZStoicism 5.0: The unlikely 21st century reboot of an ancient philosophy<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/178077/original/file-20170713-11780-gbqy57.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=496&amp;fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Keep calm and get your stoic on: more people today are heeding the advice than perhaps ever before</span> </figcaption></figure><h2>From Cynicism to Stoicism</h2>
<p>No one expects the Spanish Inquisition, to paraphrase Monty Python.<br>
We live in strange times. But few people could have expected today’s rise of a <a href="https://ericsiggyscott.wordpress.com/2016/11/30/a-quick-map-of-the-online-stoic-community/">global movement</a> of self-describing Stoic online communities numbering over 100,000 participants. </p>
<p>Stoicism was the ancient Greek and then Roman philosophy founded in the last decades of the fourth century BCE by a merchant, <a href="www.attalus.org/old/diogenes7a.html">Zeno of Citium</a> (modern Cyprus). The latter’s vessel had sunk on route to Athens, taking Zeno’s cargo down with it.</p>
<p>Zeno, it is said, made his way up to the Athenian agora. There, with his few remaining coins, he bought and read a copy of Xenophon’s <a href="https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/x/xenophon/x5me/">Memorabilia of Socrates</a>. “Where can I find a man like this?”, he is supposed to have asked the bookseller. </p>
<p>Zeno was pointed towards one Crates, a philosopher from the Cynical school. <a href="www.iep.utm.edu/cynics/">The Cynics</a> were a kind of radical break-away group from the circles surrounding the Platonic Academy and Aristotelian Lyceum. The Cynics claimed to live “according to nature”. They completely shunned social conventions and lived as simply as dogs (<em>kynes</em>), whence the name.</p>
<p>Some years later, Zeno founded his own school. He would deliver lectures to the public on the steps of Athens’ painted Stoa (whence “Stoicism”, aka “the porch”), whose foundations today lie half-concealed beneath surrounding restaurants.</p>
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<span class="caption">The painted Stoa today where Stoicism began in the late 4th century BCE.</span>
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<p>What all this has to do with men and women in the internet age, outside of classics departments, is another thing. </p>
<p>When this author has from time to time spoken on issues around the Stoic conception that philosophy is a “way of life” at academic conferences, the results vary. In some contexts, people respond with barely concealed condescension. Philosophy is about concepts, the pursuit of truth, and these days, the increasingly-uncertain pursuit of competitive advantage in a shrinking marketplace.</p>
<p>“How would you know you were living philosophically?”, someone asked at one such event. “Surely, even if we agree that a form of self-cultivation was what philosophy once was, this is no longer possible today,” others have rejoined. </p>
<p>The Stoic philosophy, some note, involved a highly systematic physics, many of whose propositions do not gel with our presently-best understandings of nature (notably, the idea of a providentially ordered cosmos that is in some sense a single living organism).</p>
<p>I had a strange Cynical impression of my own, when I recently discovered the phenomenal extent of the growth of “<a href="modernstoicism.com/">Modern Stoicism</a>”, “<a href="https://howtobeastoic.wordpress.com/">How to Be a Stoic</a>”, “<a href="https://dailystoic.com/">Daily Stoic</a>”, “<a href="www.traditionalstoicism.com/">Traditional Stoicism</a>”, and associated blogs, email lists and Youtube channels since 2013.</p>
<p>The thousands of people who write, read and practice the Stoicism prescribed by these sites, take courses and attend annual events like <a href="https://www.eventbrite.ca%20%E2%80%BA%20Things%20to%20do%20in%20Toronto%20%E2%80%BA%20Conference%20%E2%80%BA%20Community">Stoicon</a>, I thought, are responding to the academic queries like Diogenes, the most famous Cynic, is said to have responded to a metaphysical argument that purported to show that movement was impossible. </p>
<p>Initiating the long and invaluable tradition of philosophical satire, the old dog got up from his armchair and walked around. </p>
<h2>Why Stoicism?</h2>
<p>But why Stoicism, and why now? I recently asked these and other questions to several of the leading figures associated with the new Stoic movement, and spent time investigating their sites and stories.</p>
<p>The core of the answer has to be the enduring pertinence of Stoic ethics, especially as it has come down to us through the Roman Stoics Seneca, Epictetus, Musonius Rufus and Marcus Aurelius. </p>
<p>The pertinence hinges upon a few very simple, powerfully intuitive observations and principles. </p>
<p>These begin with <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/45109/45109-h/45109-h.htm">Epictetus</a>‘ simple call to people to always distinguish between what is, and is not in our control. There is, at some basic level, no rational point in being unhappy about the things we can’t change. Learning to let go of these things, in order to focus on what we can affect—our own present impulses, thoughts, and actions—just <em>has</em> to be both philosophically astute, as well as a psychological boon.</p>
<p>Imagine that all of the mental energy people spend worrying about what others think, tweet, like or say (or don’t) about them, what may happen in the future (but may not), and what cannot be changed in the past, could be freed up to attend solely to the things we each can presently alter. </p>
<p>This thought will bring you close to what the Stoics promise, via their (Socratic) stress that peoples’ inner character (or “virtue”) is the most important good anyone can prize or pursue.</p>
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<span class="caption">Bust of Marcus Aurelius, the second centUry CE Stoic philosopher-Emperor in the Metropolitan Museum.</span>
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<p>All of the other, external things—from reputation to fame to power to money to … anything subject to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune—all these are for the Stoics “indifferent”. </p>
<p>That is, they are neither good nor bad in themselves, nor can their possession or loss (as we sometimes say) “make us” happy or unhappy. It is our judgements of things which confers on them this power over us. But those judgements can be challenged by argument, and reframed through practice and resolve. </p>
<p>Stoicism has recently been described, in today’s terms, as one of the best “<a href="https://aeon.co/essays/why-stoicism-is-one-of-the-best-mind-hacks-ever-devised">mind hacks</a>” ever devised.</p>
<p>The resulting, advertised ability of Stoic “sages” to be able to bear up “philosophically”, despite the loss of their cities, properties, friends or even loved ones has given the school the perennial reputation for being a joyless, “grin and bear it” affair.</p>
<p>The Stoics however don’t want or require people to lose everything in order to find inner peace. (This is more the Cynics’ prescription). Stoicism instead asks people to cultivate the inner resources to be <em>able</em> to bear up to prosperity and adversity alike with equanimity. </p>
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<span class="caption">Hamlet’s friend Horatio, whose Stoic virtue makes him not a pipe for fortune’s finger to sound what stop she pleases.</span>
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<p>From the <a href="www.beliefnet.com/prayers/protestant/addiction/serenity-prayer.aspx">Serenity Prayer</a> to Shakespeare to <a href="https://ryanholiday.net/stoicism-a-practical-philosophy-you-can-actually-use/">Roosevelt</a> to modern authors like Walt Whitman or Tom Wolfe, Stoicism has remained one of the abiding <a href="https://www.academia.edu/29964337/Manliness_and_Stoicism_in_Tom_Wolfes_A_MAN_IN_FULL">threads</a> out of which Western culture has been woven. </p>
<p>And while most of us will find many aspects of the Stoic physics and theology foreign, there seems little in this ethics which has or could ever age. This realisation led the founders of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy to <a href="https://philosophy-of-cbt.com/the-philosophy-of-cognitive-behavioural-therapy/">adapt Stoic principles and prescriptions</a> into 20th century psychotherapy, before today’s 21st century revival under Stoicism’s own name.</p>
<p>It is just a good deal harder to be a Stoic in practice, than to Stoicise in theory. And this is where communities of debate and practice come into it.</p>
<h2>Why now and how?</h2>
<p>One old criticism of the Stoics, from the German philosopher Hegel, is that Stoicism is a philosophy for times of de-democratisation. </p>
<p>It emerged after classical Greece’s autonomous, democratic city-states had undergone terminal decline. The philosophy re-empowers people individually, in a world where everything else is at the disposal of powers, like the Hellenistic Kings and Roman Emperors, who can at any moment rob us of all our worldly possessions.</p>
<p>There are real historical problems with this idea. But perhaps it captures something about the attractions of Stoicism today. We are entering into a period in which the postwar liberal-democratic consensus is straining. Meanwhile, the security and surveillance apparati of modern corporations and nation-states increasingly call into question what privacy could mean in the internet age.</p>
<p>The internet itself is the more material cause underlying today’s proliferation of Stoic practical philosophy, outside of the walls of academe. </p>
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<span class="caption">Zeno the founding Stoic’s statue in modern Larnaka (ancient Citium/Kition) in Southern Cyprus.</span>
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<p>What we might call this “fifth Stoa” or “Stoicism 5.0"—counting the early, middle and late ancient periods scholars divide, plus the early modern "neoStoicism” of figures like <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/justus-lipsius/">Justus Lipsius</a>—had humble beginnings. </p>
<p>Nobody’s ship was sunk. But the people associated with these beginnings had no idea how quickly their progeny would grow.</p>
<p>According to Donald Robertson, author of <a href="https://philosophy-of-cbt.com/the-philosophy-of-cognitive-behavioural-therapy/">The Philosophy of Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy: Stoic Philosophy as Rational and Cognitive Psychotherapy</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Patrick Ussher, a PhD student at Essex University used it with a group of students who were trying to live for a week following the advice of Galen, Marcus Aurelius’ physician. His professor in the classics department at Essex, Chris Gill, organized for a group of people who had written about these things, including myself, Tim LeBon, and Jules Evans to meet with them and Stoic Week was born. There’s <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6qAZfCCQSw">a video</a> of that workshop at Exeter in 2012. That’s exactly how our Modern Stoicism project was born. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>This project now includes several Facebook groups (the largest of which has, as of this week, over 25, 000 members), the Stoicism Subreddit (over 54,000 subscribers), email lists within which fierce debates rage on points of theoretical detail: numerous Stoic blogs, some Stoic consultants, and hundreds of Youtube videos. </p>
<p>There is the site “<a href="www.traditionalstoicism.com">Traditional Stoicism</a>” which has broken away from the other “modern” groups on grounds of an insistence that living according to Stoic ethics requires a commitment to the ancient Stoic physics and theology. </p>
<p>There are the “<a href="http://modernstoicism.com/">Modern Stoicism</a>” and “<a href="https://howtobeastoic.wordpress.com">How to be a Stoic</a>” email feeds, on which articles on Stoic figures, texts and subjects—and, in the latter case, a popular Stoic Advice column—are posted every other day.</p>
<p>Some groups recommend Eastern meditative practices of “mindfulness” alongside, or as the corollary, of Stoic practices. <a href="http://modernstoicism.com/sati-prosoche-buddhist-vs-stoic-mindfulness-compared-by-greg-lopez/">Others demur</a>. </p>
<p>Then there is a site like “<a href="https://dailystoic.com/">Daily Stoic</a>” which sends daily Stoic meditation themes to subscribers’ email addresses: whether quotes from the great Hellenistic and Roman Stoics, or from works of literature and philosophy on Stoic themes.</p>
<h2>A way of life, not just a theory</h2>
<p>All of these online communities are united by the conviction that Stoicism was and remains, at its core, a way of life. Their founding father, in this regard, is the great French classicist and historian of philosophy, <a href="www.iep.utm.edu/hadot/">Pierre Hadot</a>. </p>
<p>In a series of works written after 1970, based upon an exacting apprenticeship in theology and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philology">philology</a>, Hadot became convinced that the only way to make sense of what the ancient Stoics (and Epicureans and Pyrrhonians) wrote was if we suppose that they conceived philosophy as what the Stoics called “<a href="https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/the-art-of-living-9781853997242/">an art of living</a>”.</p>
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<span class="caption">Pierre Hadot, author of The Inner Citadel: The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, and other influential works.</span>
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<p>Many of the texts, notably including the Roman Stoics’ at the heart of today’s Stoic revival, feature prescriptions for what Hadot called “<a href="http://au.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-0631180338.html">spiritual exercises</a>”. These include meditative exercises, wherein a student is for instance encouraged to re-envisage her situation from above, in order to re-contextualise (and bring a larger perspective to) the difficulties they face. </p>
<p>Marcus Aurelius’ <a href="https://www.files.libertyfund.org/files/2133/Aurelius_1464_LFeBk.pdf">Meditations</a> involve a series of fragments wherein the emperor enjoins this and other exercises on himself: like the practice of remembering, with gratitude, all the people who have benefited him, and what he owes to each of them; or premeditating, every morning, how in the day ahead we will confront people who irritate or misconstrue us, and situations that do not “go our way”; or remembering that “the best revenge is not to become like the person who has wronged you”, whose thoughts and actions in any case are primarily their own concern. </p>
<p>Seneca tells us that each night, before sleep, he would make time to examine all of the previous days’ actions in the Stoic light of his philosophical principles.</p>
<p>The answer to how a person would know they are living like a Stoic is then pretty clear, to all but some professionals. Zeno is again on the move. </p>
<p>The Stoic student would be undertaking these and other exercises, every day, at allocated times, in ways recommended for instance in the “<a href="https://www.spectator.co.uk%20%E2%80%BA%20Ancient%20and%20modern">Live like a Stoic</a>” week that has been running since 2012. As Robertson explained his own Stoic practice to the author recently:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I study Stoic literature pretty much every day …. [and] I try to live like a Stoic. I take a cold shower every morning; I fast every Sunday; I exercise based on Stoic principles in the mornings. I prepare for setbacks in the morning and review my day before going to sleep … I also use the View from Above if I’m ever feeling stressed. But Stoicism is my ethic, so in a sense I’m trying to apply it throughout the day to every situation.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Of course, not everyone who belongs to the 21st century, Stoic online communities will live out so completely the kind of philosophical regimen Robertson describes here. </p>
<p>But the fact that so many people now belong to these 21st century Stoic communities suggests that, <a href="https://www.rowmaninternational.com/book/socrates_tenured/3-156-d8d63a65-b0f3-4e6f-a12f-a09c9402d2cf">whatever may happen</a> to philosophy in its later modern academic iterations in coming decades, its ancient calling will remain vibrantly alive.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/80986/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<h4 class="double-bordered">Disclosure</h4><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Matthew Sharpe works for Deakin University. He is part of an AR-funded grant on modern reinventions of the ancient idea of philosophy as a way of life, and is presently working on a book on a coauthored monograph on the subject. .He wishes to thanks John Sellars, Massimo Pigliuci, and Donald Robertson for their time, suggestions, corrections and thoughts.</span></em></p>Stoicism has recently been described as one of the best "mind hacks" ever invented. Amazingly, it is back, more popular today than ever, in a series of fast-growing internet communities.Matthew Sharpe, Associate Professor in Philosophy, Deakin UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/796342017-06-25T12:42:06Z2017-06-25T12:42:06ZApologies: Your Best Guide on the Internet<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/174262/original/file-20170617-11462-7tj75b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=496&amp;fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The Reconciliation of Paris and Helen after his Defeat by Menelaus Richard Westall</span> </figcaption></figure><p>Self-help book and works of popular psychology often instruct us in the art of apologising. Their advice is reflected, in turn, in much online discussion.</p>
<p>Most commonly, we’re advised to give elaborate, self-abasing apologies: apologies that go well beyond acknowledging misjudgement or admitting to wrongdoing. <a href="https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-squeaky-wheel/201311/the-five-ingredients-effective-apology">With</a> <a href="https://www.mannersmentor.com/gracious-living/how-to-apologize-the-7-steps-of-a-sincere-apology">variations</a>, we are told to elaborate in detail just what we did wrong, describe why it was unacceptable, offer nothing in the way of justification or excuse (though sometimes we’re told we can give an explanation without justifying ourselves), and provide explicit assurances that we will never repeat the behaviour. In summary, we’re told to condemn, criticise and abase ourselves, and to ask humbly for forgiveness.</p>
<p>This might be needed for some betrayals of love or friendship. But for most situations it is very bad advice.</p>
<h2>Serious wrongdoing</h2>
<p>In its most serious mode, the social practice of apologising relates to actions that are later regretted, leading to deep feelings of guilt or shame. With the passage of time, or when we’re brought to focus on what we’ve said or done, we sometimes feel terrible about our own conduct.</p>
<p>To save space, I’ll set aside serious failures resulting from, for example, incompetence (much as these might be interesting in their own right). Let’s consider cases of serious wrongdoing. Here, one person has deliberately harmed or deceived another (or others) in a significant way. In the worst cases, the victim might be someone who legitimately expected the wrongdoer’s goodwill, special concern or even love.</p>
<p>In a situation like this, the victim has every reason to feel profoundly betrayed. Since the wrongdoing was deliberate and significant, it revealed something important and unsavoury about the wrongdoer’s character - what she was psychologically capable of - and especially about her attitude to her victim. In acting as she did, she showed an attitude of disrespect or even malice.</p>
<p>If she aims at reconciliation and seeks forgiveness, the wrongdoer will need to demonstrate that she has undergone something of a psychological transformation. She will need to express heartfelt remorse, show a clear understanding of how she betrayed the victim, and offer especially strong and convincing assurances. She will enter the territory of condemning her own moral character - as it was expressed in the past - and claiming to have changed.</p>
<p>Even the most complete and self-abasing apology might not be enough to regain the victim’s trust and good opinion. The wrongdoer has, after all, revealed by her actions that she was psychologically capable of acting with disrespect or worse. Furthermore, claims to have transformed in moral character are inherently difficult to believe. The victim might understandably be unwilling to restore the relationship to anything like what it previously was.</p>
<p>But most cases are nothing like this. Worthwhile thoughts about apologising in cases of serious wrongdoing can be very bad advice for the range of milder situations that we encounter almost every day.</p>
<h2>Everyday cases</h2>
<p>In most situations, any sense of guilt or shame is greatly attenuated, even to the point where it might - quite properly - not be felt at all. Thus, words like “sorry” are uttered more as matter of politeness and social convention than to express heartfelt remorse.</p>
<p>Think of the following sequence of events (which happened to me a few days ago). I’d alighted from an intercity train, late at night, and was walking along a moderately crowded platform when I stopped - fairly suddenly, no doubt - to check out a vending machine. The middle-aged man walking immediately behind brushed my arm as he stepped past, and we automatically turned to each other to say, “Sorry!” We spontaneously nodded and smiled at each other, raising our hands, palms outward, as if to indicate peaceful intent and absence of weapons … and he then walked on while I concluded that I didn’t really want the junk food on offer in the machine. And that was all.</p>
<p>The entire exchange took only a few seconds, and neither of us had to go through any process of abasement or self-criticism. How, exactly, is this different from cases that seem far more serious?</p>
<p>It is different along many dimensions, and what follows is not intended to be complete. First, no one was hurt (even psychologically). At most, both of us were momentarily startled.</p>
<p>Second, it would be beside the point to castigate either of us in any serious way. Perhaps we could both have been a bit more conscious of what was going on around us, but at most we showed the sort of lapse in attention and concentration that happens to human beings all the time. I had not been aware of his presence behind me; he did not expect me to stop. But people frequently bump into each other in crowds, and no one is seriously blamed: it’s a normal part of life. It would, of course, be quite different if somebody recklessly <em>sprinted</em> through a crowd, shoving aside people who were in his way.</p>
<p>Third, the two people concerned had no previous relationship except, I suppose, as fellow citizens and fellow human beings. There was no relationship of special regard and trust to try to restore. In that sense, we were not exactly seeking <em>reconciliation</em>, although a certain <em>smoothing</em> of the situation was called for. I doubt, however, that this point makes much difference. Even if the man who brushed past me had turned out to be an old friend, no elaborate apology would have been needed.</p>
<p>Small everyday incidents such as this can be surprisingly pleasant encounters. As long as both people act in the expected way - immediately signalling goodwill and peaceful intent - these incidents make us feel better about ourselves and tend to strengthen societal bonds. For a brief moment, each person provides the other with reassurance that whatever happened was not a prelude to any malicious or violent - or otherwise unfriendly or anti-social - course of action. Importantly, each conveys that the other deserves consideration and respect.</p>
<p>Notice how, during these quick exchanges, we often smile or laugh; we express some mutual amusement at the little tangles of social life. In part, we laugh at our own fallibility, and we forgive ourselves and each other for it. We acknowledge that our fallibility is part of being human, and that it does not, in itself, merit condemnation.</p>
<p>And yet, we do say “Oh, sorry!” or use similar words. In context, this is not an admission of serious wrongdoing or guilty thoughts. We are not seeking anything as grand as forgiveness. By using such words, however, we offer clarity and reassurance. We express something like the following: “I made a miscalculation (or had a lapse in concentration, or whatever might be the case); please understand that I bear you no ill will or disrespect; you have nothing to fear from me.”</p>
<p>Often, this is what we really want to know from each other, and this message also has the advantage that it is usually a <em>believable</em> one. By contrast, an assurance by a serious wrongdoer that she will never do such a thing again might strain credulity.</p>
<p>Words of apology are, then, often given without accepting any blameworthiness. Since we are human - not infallible or omniscient beings - we make mistakes, get distracted, have lapses in concentration, and so on. Sometimes, indeed, we take actions that prove not to be optimal, even though they were <em>not</em> contraindicated on the information available to us at the time.</p>
<p>If you’re at all like me, you might very often find yourself apologising for things that you don’t feel especially ashamed of or guilty about. You might also receive such apologies from others.</p>
<p>For example, a salesperson might apologise to you if you have to wait for an unusually long time to be served, even if the delay was caused by something obviously beyond her control. The apology does not indicate an admission of wrongdoing, and it is certainly not an assurance that nothing like this will happen again (it might well!). But it offers respect and reassurance to someone who has been inconvenienced, even unavoidably.</p>
<h2>Miscommunications</h2>
<p>I frequently find myself apologising to someone I’m talking to if I’ve miscommunicated what I was trying to say and thus caused confusion (or perhaps even hurt feelings). Alternatively, I might apologise if I realise that I’ve been interpreting my interlocutor wrongly: I’ve grabbed the wrong end of the verbal pineapple and thereby caused confusion. In either case, however, the miscommunication is not a reason to feel any serious guilt or shame.</p>
<p>For example, if I misinterpret somebody’s words the reason might be genuine ambiguity in what he said. Conversely, if someone misunderstands my words, perhaps he was being uncharitable. Alternatively, it might have been genuinely difficult to formulate the idea I was trying to get across - and in the circumstances perhaps I couldn’t have been expected to do any better.</p>
<p>It might nonetheless be reasonable - and it is somewhat conventional - to waive our possible defences once we realise that we’re at cross purposes in a conversation. It isn’t difficult, and it can become almost instinctive, to say things like “Sorry - I’ll rephrase that” or “Oops, sorry – I see what you mean now.”</p>
<p>The truth of it is, we can <em>almost always</em> express ourselves a bit more clearly and listen a bit more astutely. In acknowledging this on any particular occasion, we are not admitting to serious wrongdoing or a nasty attitude. Our mild words of apology can and should reflect this.</p>
<p>Through minor apologies, we reassure the people we’re dealing with that we view them as worthy of respect. We signal that we don’t hold grudges or assign blame over small things that have gone wrong, and that the people we encounter don’t need to worry about how we regard them or what we might do next. All this helps us get along socially, as human beings must.</p>
<h2>A flexible practice</h2>
<p>The more we think about the practice of apologising, the more we become aware of how varied, complex and flexible it is.</p>
<p>On some occasions, perhaps you should have taken more care, yet you were not outright malicious or even reckless. Perhaps you were tired or stressed or poorly prepared for a task. In these cases, something more than a brief conventional apology might be in order. All the same, mere failure to take adequate care does not indicate anything especially unsavoury about your moral character. It happens from time to time to almost anyone.</p>
<p>If your carelessness has caused significant harm, you might feel urgent concern for those affected and you might owe them some kind of redress. But depending on the circumstances, it might be overkill if an officious interloper demanded that you humble and condemn yourself. If you did any such thing, it would feel and appear insincere.</p>
<p>Irrespective of any advice from pop psychologists, it often makes sense to accompany an apology with an explanation or excuse. Indeed, explanations or excuses can be <em>better</em> than apologies. Allow me to elaborate.</p>
<p>It is often said that <a href="https://genderbitch.wordpress.com/2010/01/23/intent-its-fucking-magic/">“intent is not magic”</a>, and that phrase does have some point when clear-cut harm has been inflicted on somebody identifiable. In more cases than not, however, it is precisely the wrong way to think about human interaction. Often, what hurts us most about someone else’s conduct is the attitude that it seems to reveal. It might seem to show that the person views us with malice or disrespect. If she is someone we care for, that can be emotionally devastating. We might wonder whether our relationship with her was based all along on an illusion.</p>
<p>But much of the sting is removed if she gives an explanation or excuse that shows she <em>does not</em>, after all, harbour malice or disrespect. She might, in fact, utter conventional words of apology, but the important thing is that she reassure us in some convincing way about how she feels. The point of good explanations is that they really do explain; the point of good excuses is that they really do excuse.</p>
<p>In some cases, we can even apologise for actions that were not our own. For example, you might apologise (as you try to shuffle him out of a party) for the boorish and embarrassing conduct of a friend who has had too much to drink. Similarly, a media organisation might apologise for a defamatory or outrageous remark made by a guest.</p>
<p>Likewise, the leader of a country might apologise formally for something done by her country, even if it happened a long time ago before she was born. This is a fairly well understood public act with a potential to reconcile and heal. It makes intuitive sense because it relies on the idea that political entities have an ongoing existence beyond the lifetimes and participation of their individual citizens.</p>
<p>However, not just any relationship can make an apology coherent. There has to be the right sort of connection between the person giving the apology and somebody else’s behaviour. For example, you can’t sensibly apologise for your friend’s boorish actions on some past occasion when you were not even present.</p>
<p>In some situations, we don’t have a clear idea who may have been inconvenienced or offended by our conduct. Contrary to much advice on the Internet, it makes perfectly good sense in these circumstances to offer contingent apologies such as “We apologise for any inconvenience” or “I am sorry if I upset anyone.”</p>
<p>On some particular occasion, you might think that any upset from your conduct was not reasonable. You might even doubt whether anyone was genuinely upset, as opposed to grandstanding to make a point. Nonetheless, you might also feel concern about any upset that actually was experienced, even unreasonably. If so, a mild and contingent apology might be perfectly in order. It is a socially intuitive way to convey that you are not motivated by malice or disrespect. And again, it signals that whatever you did or said was not the precursor to a more troubling course of conduct.</p>
<p>This leads me to the sensitive topic of weaponised demands for apologies, often followed by equally weaponised complaints about “notpologies”.</p>
<h2>Weaponised demands and complaints</h2>
<p>As we’ve seen, it’s coherent to apologise even when you are guilty of nothing more than ordinary human fallibility - or sometimes even when your conduct was justifiable. An example of the latter is when you have inconvenienced somebody in order to deal with a crisis.</p>
<p>In other cases, you - or I - might be guilty of something more than ever-present human fallibility. Even then, we might have shown no more than a low degree of negligence that is easily excused. In these cases, we might feel concern if we’ve caused anyone serious harm. Usually, however, feelings of deep guilt or shame will not be fitting. (Very often, in fact, it’s debatable whether we really were careless or merely unlucky: the line can be very blurred, and reasonable people can reach different conclusions.)</p>
<p>In all, the practice of apologising is subtle and complex, and we should enjoy a considerable range of discretion in when and how far we engage in it.</p>
<p>When others demand that we apologise against our own initial judgement, it can be a form of abuse or a political weapon. At the level of personal relationships, demands for apologies can be abusive: a method of punishment and control. At the level of political, social, and cultural debate, the purpose is to humiliate and discredit somebody who is viewed as an opponent or a wrongdoer.</p>
<p>If we force a public apology from someone we cast as a villain, we gain a victory over them and we warn others not to behave similarly. This might have some social value if restricted to people who’ve engaged in genuinely outrageous conduct. However, through <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-shame-of-public-shaming-57584">public shaming</a> and threats to careers, humiliating apologies can be forced from people who have done little - or arguably nothing - wrong.</p>
<p>As we’ve seen, elaborate self-criticism and self-abasement <em>might</em> be appropriate sometimes. They might be called for when apologising in private to a loved one who has been betrayed in some way. But when somebody is forced through this process in public - perhaps because of her honestly stated opinion on a matter of legitimate controversy, or perhaps for the phrasing of an unrehearsed remark - it is a cruel, unnecessary, indecent spectacle.</p>
<p>To be clear, somebody who is pressured to apologise might, indeed, feel concern at having offended others. She might willingly offer some clarification and some mild words of apology. The latter might, for example, be along the lines of, “I’m sorry if anyone was offended.” In the circumstances, this response provides clarification of intent, reassurance, and an expression of goodwill. Once a shaming campaign begins, however, it won’t get anyone off the public relations hook.</p>
<p>Whatever mob is pressuring and shaming her will inevitably condemn her (quite reasonable) response as a mere “notpology” and apply further pressure. In this parlance, appropriately limited and contingent apologies are referred to as “notpologies” by zealots who hope to humiliate and discredit their real or imagined enemies.</p>
<p>When demands and complaints are made in this weaponised manner, we have a powerful reason to resist them. Each time someone gives in to a mob of zealots, and offers public self-criticism and a humiliating public apology, it encourages the mob to find new victims. Don’t give such mobs positive feedback.</p>
<h2>Your best guide?</h2>
<p>My subheading to this article, “Your Best Guide on the Internet”, is lighthearted but on point. As I’ve emphasised, the practice of apologising is complex. We often have to make subtle, discriminating decisions about when and how to engage in it. By contrast, most advice on the Internet is misleading in suggesting that there is a single formula that we need to learn.</p>
<p>Fortunately, our intuitions are usually well honed by experience during our formative years, and most of us make reasonable judgements more often than not, even on the spur of the moment. We might not always be aware of it consciously, but we sense in our everyday practices that apologies can take many forms to suit a myriad of circumstances.</p>
<p>None of this is intended to suggest that I always get it right in my own life! Perhaps no one does; in any event, I am not holding myself out as a role model. I have sometimes made mistakes in this area, even quite serious ones, usually out of anger or pride or self-righteousness. If I have any advice to give beyond the most obvious, it’s to try to avoid those feelings - especially in combination. It’s wise to put them aside, if we can, and in cases of doubt it’s often best to give some sort of apology even if it goes against our grain.</p>
<p>The ability to apologise freely, without embarrassment, should be easier if we recognise how often our mistakes come from ordinary human limitations for which we should feel no particular guilt or shame. Combined with this, most apologies do <em>not</em> relate to serious wrongdoing, disrespectful attitudes to others, or defects of character.</p>
<p>Everyday apologies usually have rather conventional and pragmatic functions: to express regret (but not necessarily culpability) for inconvenience, confusion or hurt; to assure others that we respect them and recognise their interests, and that our intentions are not hostile; and to indicate that others have nothing to fear from us going forward.</p>
<p>In a sense, none of this is new. I’m telling readers what they already know, but the opposite of what they are too often told. I’ve set out in an explicit way some of the complexity that we are all aware of if we’re not confused by pop psychology or a dubious ideology.</p>
<p>Once again: it is often worth apologising (albeit mildly) even when we’ve done nothing wrong; apologies are often quite legitimately accompanied by explanations or excuses; most apologies do <em>not</em> have to be lengthy or especially self-critical or self-abasing. In some situations, much-maligned “notpologies” might be all that is needed.</p>
<p>This complexity should be familiar, once we think about it clearly and for ourselves.</p>
<p>For each of us, as individuals, the social practice of apologising gives many options to match with the ever-changing situations we encounter in our lives. We can think of them as tools in our social kit. Exactly how we use them is up to us.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/79634/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
Self-help book and works of popular psychology often instruct us in the art of apologising. Their advice is reflected, in turn, in much online discussion. Most commonly, we’re advised to give elaborate…Russell Blackford, Conjoint Lecturer in Philosophy, University of NewcastleLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/788042017-06-03T03:40:22Z2017-06-03T03:40:22ZTrump’s Paris Retreat is Beijing’s Opportunity<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/172090/original/file-20170603-20563-kwbmzp.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=496&amp;fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The Chinese hoax</span> </figcaption></figure><p>One of China’s foremost environmental analysts recently explained to me that while for many years climate change was characterized as a western conspiracy to hold China back, it all changed around 2012. Overcoming China’s testiness about western imperialist designs and bringing China into the international climate tent may in future be seen as one of President Obama’s <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/sep/03/breakthrough-us-china-agree-ratify-paris-climate-change-deal">lasting legacies</a>.</p>
<p>When President Xi Jinping took charge in late 2012 he soon launched an ‘energy revolution’. He took up the call for an ‘ecological civilization’ and sent a message that coal would no longer be favoured.</p>
<p>Provincial governments, which had resisted Beijing’s dictats to reduce coal use, began to be brought into line. As Xi accumulated more power, by marginalizing his enemies or having them arrested for corruption, it became increasingly risky to mess with Beijing. But the provinces too are shifting away from their GDP obsession to a greater emphasis on quality of life.</p>
<p>The first phase of China’s national carbon market is expected to get under way this year. The Paris agreement and Xi’s constructive role in it greatly enhanced the influence of China’s environment ministry in bureaucratic tussles. Paris is now a powerful card to play, and incorporating environmental governance into policy has become the ‘new normal’.</p>
<p>Coal use has now topped out in China, and total emissions are expected to peak around 2022-23, well ahead of the committed date of 2030 under the Paris Agreement. Unlike the United States, China takes its Intended Nationally Determined Contribution under the Paris accord very seriously.</p>
<h2>China’s carbon cuts</h2>
<p>Beijing has a number of motives for taking an aggressive approach to carbon emissions. The headline one is social discontent due to appalling air pollution in the cities. Instead of closing coal-fired power stations, pollution levels could have been cut sharply by fitting scrubbers to them (as is done in the west), leaving carbon emissions untouched. But there are other reasons for cutting coal consumption.</p>
<p>One is to undermine the power base of some of the most corrupt officials in the country, the bosses of the coal and electricity sectors. Unlike most of China’s leaders, Xi is no a technocrat, which helps.</p>
<p>Beyond these domestic goals, the Party’s leadership can see a larger global dimension. Hastening China’s transition to low-carbon energy promises to give China ascendancy in the emerging renewable energy industries, industries set for massive expansion over the next decades as coal and oil combustion declines. Vast opportunities are available for the nation that manages to take the lead, and China is well on the way to doing so.</p>
<p>This is why Trump’s decision is not just a serious set-back to global efforts to limit emissions but also damages US economic prospects. When US companies find they must go to China to buy their energy generation equipment they will understand that ‘America first’ means America loses. Some of them can see it already.</p>
<h2>A new world leader</h2>
<p>At the highest level of strategy, Trump’s decision to ditch the Paris agreement presents Beijing with a golden opportunity to take on the mantle of global leadership. China has been slowly and systematically pursuing that role over some years by, for example, expanding its role in UN peace-keeping efforts.</p>
<p>And it has been presenting itself as the new champion of global economic integration. President Xi’s <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/us-davos-meeting-china-idUSKBN15118V">speech</a> at Davos in January, where he condemned protectionism and lauded the benefits of free trade and investment flows, was timed to contrast with the Trumpian retreat.</p>
<p>The United States <a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/business-38061616">abandonment</a> of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which through more trade and investment would have strengthened US ties to East and Southeast Asia, left a hole for China to step into. The grand One Belt, One Road <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/13/business/china-railway-one-belt-one-road-1-trillion-plan.html?_r=0">initiative</a> is a pitch for global economic leadership that will grow as the United States shrinks into itself.</p>
<p>Climate change presents China with the opportunity to acquire new legitimacy and respect as a world leader, offsetting the damage from its aggression in the South China Sea and escalating repression at home.</p>
<p>Some analysts say that China is not yet ready to become the global leader, and displays a certain reluctance to seize the mantle. But faced with indecision and disorder in the west the Party leadership has often had to decide to grab a chance while it is there, or bide its time and take the risk that it will be much harder later.</p>
<p>US withdrawal from global climate change leadership may be too good an opportunity to let pass. And there could be no better way for Beijing to demonstrate its claimed commitment to a peaceful and prosperous world than by directing the billions of dollars promised under the One Belt, One Road Initiative into low-carbon energy systems in developing countries. Developed countries too may find the lure of Chinese lucre too strong to resist and end up with energy infrastructures stamped ‘Made in China’.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/78804/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
One of China’s foremost environmental analysts recently explained to me that while for many years climate change was characterized as a western conspiracy to hold China back, it all changed around 2012…Clive Hamilton, Professor of Public Ethics, Centre For Applied Philosophy & Public Ethics (CAPPE), Charles Sturt UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/779532017-05-18T04:35:18Z2017-05-18T04:35:18ZThe - Roger - Stone Age Man<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/169886/original/file-20170518-9937-1t4fy50.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=496&amp;fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Roger Stone: for some the brain behind Trump and the star of a new documentary film</span> </figcaption></figure><h2>Pleased to meet you …</h2>
<p>We are entering the “Age of Stone”, the hero of Netflix’s new documentary <a href="https://www.netflix.com/title/80114666">Get Me Roger Stone</a> concludes by announcing.</p>
<p>It is blue skies a-comin’ as far as this unlikely hero, one part Machiavelli, another part Oscar Wilde is concerned:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>We’re in the Age of Stone because the change in politics, the rough and tumble cutthroat and slash and burn of what was the nastiest campaign in American history [Trump’s campaign to win the Presidency] are now in vogue.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>To people who will watch the film and loathe him, Stone answers with a characteristic glint: “I revel in your hatred because if I weren’t effective you wouldn’t hate me.”</p>
<p>The answer points to the heart of what can be called Stone’s “philosophy”, a kind of two-beat Machiavellianism, as <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niccol%C3%B2_Machiavelli">this philosophy</a> is popularly understood. </p>
<p>The ends justify the means. Effectiveness is all.</p>
<p>Besides, “<a href="http://www.anonymousconservative.com/blog/roger-stones-rules">losers don’t legislate</a>”, as Mr Stone’s hero Richard Nixon had said. </p>
<p>And everyone for Stone is a “bitter loser” who for instance criticizes him for his role in lobbying the US Congress on behalf of third world dictators with the infamous ‘80s Lobbying Agency <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Black,_Manafort,_Stone_and_Kelly">Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly</a>.</p>
<p>Or who criticises him for pretty much any other of his words and actions in a remarkable backroom career looking back to the infamous Republican Campaign to Reelect the President in 1972 and forwards to the 2016 election of Donald J Trump.</p>
<h2>Past is prologue</h2>
<p>Stone boasts that, in his early 20s, he was the youngest man indicted by the committee investigating the Watergate break-in. </p>
<p>His earliest introduction to politics, Stone tells, was an exercise in deceit. He won a class election at his school on a Kennedy ticket (his parents were Irish Catholics), by lying that if Nixon was elected he would bring in school on Saturdays.</p>
<p>“For the first time ever I understood the power of disinformation. Of course, I’ve never used it since,” Stone laughs as he recalls the tale from behind an elegant overcoat, cigar in hand.</p>
<p>Yet, as the film rolls on, Stone contradicts this one fig leaf to “liberal” moralising, as well as the reassuring rider appended to his Master Rule: “do whatever it takes, <em>short of breaking the Law</em>”. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/169887/original/file-20170518-24325-8wrpi0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=754&amp;fit=clip">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Stone with Nixon watching his back.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Stone has certainly made a business of skirting the boundaries even of what is legal to provide his “superior insights” into how Washington works and save America from the moral decay represented by the Democrats, led by his arch-enemies Bill and Hillary Clinton.</p>
<p>As one of the journalists interviewed in the film comments, Stone has shown up at nearly every decisive moment in American political history since <a href="https://www.reference.com%20%E2%80%BA%20History%20%E2%80%BA%20Modern%20History%20%E2%80%BA%20US%20History">Tricky Dick</a>, like a kind of rogue Forrest Gump. </p>
<p>Stone, with his colleagues at <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black,_Manafort,_Stone_and_Kelly">Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly</a> were behind the birth of today’s age of the “SuperPac"—”<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_action_committee">political action committees</a>“ who can take money to advertise for particular candidates, while maintaining a legal independence from the Major Parties whose bidding they serve.</p>
<p>Members of my own and younger generations will be surprised to see the film’s archival footage of Nixon already lambasting "elites” in the name of the “silent majority”; or of Ronald Reagan, beneath the Statue of Liberty, already promising that, yes, <em>he</em> will make America Great Again.</p>
<p>To the extent that Stone says anything about the actual policy goals he supports: “There is a silent majority” and “I am the Law and Order candidate” sum it up, in what are effectively two bumper stickers.</p>
<p>You need to keep your PR simple when you understand how democracy works, in the Age of Stone. The “non-sophisticates” do not do details, and can’t distinguish politics from show business.</p>
<p>Politics is “show business for ugly people.”</p>
<h2>Advertise, advertise, advertise</h2>
<p>Stone is known by his friends and his enemies as “the Prince of Darkness”, a label he has made his own.</p>
<p>He is presently under investigation for his possible links to the alleged Russian exercise in hacking the 2016 election. His approach so far has matched another of his Rules: “deny, deny, deny.”</p>
<p>Then admit, and move on, and subsequently glorify in the action: perhaps even make a film about yourself. </p>
<p>Stone thus claims to have been the mastermind behind the “<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks_Brothers_rio">Brooks Brothers’ riot</a>” which stopped the vote-recount in Florida in 2000 and ensured that George W. Bush would win that recount. </p>
<p>With some pride, he now admits to having single-handedly brought down the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reform_Party_of_the_United_States_of_America">Reform Party</a> in the same year 2000, through an arch double or triple game. </p>
<p>First, he encouraged <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pat_Buchanan_presidential_campaign,_2000">Pat Buchanan</a> to run for the ticket, secure in the knowledge that Buchanan had an illegitimate child: information whose threatened disclosure could then be used to undermine Buchanan.</p>
<p>Then, Stone suggested that Mr Donald J. Trump-who for over a decade Stone had already been urging to run for President-should run against Buchanan. </p>
<p>This would give the property mogul a taster of life in the political limelight. It would divide Buchanan’s vote, making the way straight for the Republicans to beat Al Gore.</p>
<p>The Donald duly stepped up to the plate. With Stone at his shoulder, he poured out the kind of vitriol that has indeed come of age as of 2017. </p>
<p>Mr Buchanan, the now-President informed his fellow Americans, was an “anti-Semite, doesn’t like gays … he is in love with Adolf Hitler in some form … and the Reform Party shouldn’t be taking losers …”</p>
<p>(There’s that word again, key vocab for the Age of Stone.)</p>
<p>In the event, Buchanan got less than half a percent of American votes for the Presidency. The Reform Party collapsed. Aided by Stone’s other triumph, the riot in Florida, “W” made the Oval Office.</p>
<p>Interviewed in a diner, Stone for once uses understatement as he ‘fesses up to this backhanded <em>chef-d'œuvre</em>: “yeah I might have played some role in derailing them as a party.”</p>
<h2>Apotheosis</h2>
<p>Most of Stone’s Rules are about “doing whatever it takes” without mercy, without morality, without remorse.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>It is better to be infamous than never to be famous at all.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>He has open contempt for the media. Stone thinks it is either evil or incompetent. When a winner knows this, he can win big.</p>
<p>For politics, his own profession, there is no less cynical an assessment: it is “corrupt” through and through. Washington is a “cesspool”. Stone knows, since he has “seen how the sausages are made”. </p>
<p>He has made a few himself.</p>
<p>Another of Stone’s Rules enjoins admirers that “Unless you can fake sincerity, you’ll get nowhere in this business.”</p>
<p>Stone embraces the politics of shock, advising that it is better to be wrong than to be boring.</p>
<blockquote>
<p><a href="http://www.thatcherkeats.blogspot.com/2009/01/stones-rules.html">Hit it</a> from every angle. Open multiple fronts on your enemy. He must be confused, and feel besieged on every side.“</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In several scenes of the movie, the only ones when he is not immaculately decked out in pinstripe suits, Stone 2016 sports white T-shirts with images of Bill Clinton, captions reading "Rape”; or black Tees picturing “Crooked Hillary” behind bars.</p>
<p>“Politics isn’t theatre. It’s performance art. Sometimes, for its own sake,” this sage rhapsodises: “Be bold. The more you tell, the more you sell”.</p>
<p>Per the Tee-shirts: “Hatred is a stronger motivator than love”.</p>
<p>The apotheosis of all of this indeed came last year. Stone was, then wasn’t, then was again, an official advisor to the successful Presidential bid of Donald J. Trump. As we have seen, he boasts that he was instrumental in inspiring the “nastiest campaign” in American history.</p>
<p>In the midst of it all, of course, came the hacking scandal which looks very like the kind of “whatever it takes”, underhand action that Roger will eventually advertise if a “Who is Roger Stone?” is made come 2027 or 2030.</p>
<p>While he <a href="https://www.theguardian.com%20%E2%80%BA%20US%20News%20%E2%80%BA%20Donald%20Trump">denies foreknowledge</a> of the Clinton Campaign Leader’s email leaks, five days before the leaks Stone tweeted, “Wednesday Hillary Clinton is done. #Wikileaks.” </p>
<p>Again before the leaks, Stone turned prophet: “it will soon be Podesta’s time in the barrel.”</p>
<p>Mr Trump, after apparently sacking “Roger” in 2016 before reinstating him again, has only good things to say in Get Me Roger Stone about his long-standing ally. </p>
<p>For Trump, Stone is “a quality guy … a nice guy”: “he loves it, he loves the game, and he’s very good at it.” For Stone, Mr Trump is “quality political horse-flesh” for a jockey like him to ride to power.</p>
<p>And yes, gentle readers, we are asked to believe that it is this Roger Stone—unrepentant founder of multi-million dollar lobbying, who retails his cynicism as the stone cold truth; and it is the “Roger Stone types” now installed in Washington in his wake, who can overturn the corruption of the political “elites”.</p>
<p>In the Age of Stone, it is these new types of amoral politicos who are going to “drain the swamp” on the Potomac.</p>
<h2>Para-Machiavel</h2>
<p>Legend tells that when Frederick the Great wrote a work, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Machiavel">Anti-Machiavel</a>, some wit observed that to deny his Machiavellian credentials is exactly what “Tricky Nic” would have recommended.</p>
<p>Frederick’s career hardly bears out his matchless humanity. (Will and Ariel Durant comment that they will not dwell on the wars he started, since they are writing a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Story_of_Civilization">history of <em>civilization</em></a>).</p>
<p>Yet there is something positively refreshing, naïve, or idealistic about Niccolo Machiavelli’s texts, compared to the pithy “wisdom” retailed by the titular hero of Get Me Roger Stone.</p>
<p>Of course, Machiavelli was a patriot, as Stone claims to be. But Machiavelli argued for some seasonable mixture of virtue and vice, with cruelty less desirable than mercy, fear a less desirable political motive than love; and deceit only to be used in case of exceptional need.</p>
<p>Machiavelli, that is, preserves a sense that cunning, deceit and cruelty are far from desirable in themselves. And it was for this many concessions to what men do, rather than what they ought, that he was for a long time shunned by all Christendom. </p>
<p>In the dawning Age of Stone, by contrast, “winners” can apparently agree that immorality for the sake of “conservative” causes is less something to be concealed than to be celebrated. Having lost its cloak of shame, ruthless cunning in this dawning Age is newly chic: if not the new red, then decked out in elegantly tailored pinstripes and slippers. </p>
<p>Watching Get Me Roger Stone is thus like the in many ways equally bizarre tele-series <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeland_(TV_series)">Homeland</a>. This show, far from downplaying the ostensibly troubling idea that America has routinised espionage, including on its own citizens, and illegal drone strikes in foreign lands, makes these things one of the open <em>premises</em> of the action.</p>
<p>Winners will surely no longer need to “deny, deny, deny” when the Age of Stone reaches its zenith. </p>
<p>As another talking head on the film comments about Roger’s close relationship with <a href="https://www.infowars.com/">Infowars</a> and <a href="http://www.breitbart.com/">Breitbart</a> media: “we are all conspiracy Americans now”.</p>
<p>Perhaps America will become great again. But if it does so, it will need to recall what people like George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, Benjamin Franklin and its other founders would have thought and done about a character like Roger Stone, and the moral decay that he wants to enshrine as the <em>Novo ordus seclorum</em>.</p>
<p>We are a long way from George Washington on campaign asking players to act out dramas of <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Romes-Last-Citizen-Legacy-Mortal/dp/0312681232">the life and fall of Cato the Younger</a>, dreaming of emulating the Romans’ republican virtues.</p>
<p>In the Age of Stone, the emperor is naked, but that is because he is flashing.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/77953/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<h4 class="double-bordered">Disclosure</h4><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Matthew Sharpe works at Deakin, where he has taught political philosophy. He is part of an ARC funded project on Religion and Political Thought.</span></em></p>Roger Stone, "the prince of darkness", has been called "Trump's brain". So what is going on in there? And what does it mean when ruthless cunning becomes the new morality?Matthew Sharpe, Associate Professor in Philosophy, Deakin UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/772962017-05-07T03:29:55Z2017-05-07T03:29:55ZThe great climate silence: we are on the edge of the abyss but we ignore it<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/168206/original/file-20170507-19145-8n95t4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=496&amp;fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Extract</span> </figcaption></figure><p>After 200,000 years of modern humans on a 4.5 billion-year-old Earth, we have arrived at new point in history: the Anthropocene. The change has come upon us with disorienting speed. It is the kind of shift that typically takes two or three or four generations to sink in.</p>
<p>Our best scientists tell us insistently that a calamity is unfolding, that the life-support systems of the Earth are being damaged in ways that threaten our survival. Yet in the face of these facts we carry on as usual.</p>
<p>Most citizens ignore or downplay the warnings; many of our intellectuals indulge in wishful thinking; and some influential voices declare that nothing at all is happening, that the scientists are deceiving us. Yet the evidence tells us that so powerful have humans become that we have entered this new and dangerous geological epoch, which is defined by the fact that the human imprint on the global environment has now become so large and active that it rivals some of the great forces of nature in its impact on the functioning of the Earth system.</p>
<p>This bizarre situation, in which we have become potent enough to change the course of the Earth yet seem unable to regulate ourselves, contradicts every modern belief about the kind of creature the human being is. So for some it is absurd to suggest that humankind could break out of the boundaries of history and inscribe itself as a geological force in deep time. Humans are too puny to change the climate, they insist, so it is outlandish to suggest we could change the geological time scale. Others assign the Earth and its evolution to the divine realm, so that it is not merely impertinence to suggest that humans can overrule the almighty, but blasphemy.</p>
<p>Many intellectuals in the social sciences and humanities do not concede that Earth scientists have anything to say that could impinge on their understanding of the world, because the “world” consists only of humans engaging with humans, with nature no more than a passive backdrop to draw on as we please.</p>
<p>The “humans-only” orientation of the social sciences and humanities is reinforced by our total absorption in representations of reality derived from media, encouraging us to view the ecological crisis as a spectacle that takes place outside the bubble of our existence.
It is true that grasping the scale of what is happening requires not only breaking the bubble but also making the cognitive leap to “Earth system thinking” – that is, conceiving of the Earth as a single, complex, dynamic system. It is one thing to accept that human influence has spread across the landscape, the oceans and the atmosphere, but quite another to make the jump to understanding that human activities are disrupting the functioning of the Earth as a complex, dynamic, ever-evolving totality comprised of myriad interlocking processes.</p>
<p>But consider this astounding fact: with knowledge of the cycles that govern Earth’s rotation, including its tilt and wobble, paleo-climatologists are able to predict with reasonable certainty that the next ice age is due in 50,000 years’ time. Yet because carbon dioxide persists in the atmosphere for millennia, global warming from human activity in the 20th and 21st centuries is expected to suppress that ice age and quite possibly the following one, expected in 130,000 years.</p>
<p>If human activity occurring over a century or two can irreversibly transform the global climate for tens of thousands of years, we are prompted to rethink history and social analysis as a purely intra-human affair.</p>
<p>How should we understand the disquieting fact that a mass of scientific evidence about the Anthropocene, an unfolding event of colossal proportions, has been insufficient to induce a reasoned and fitting response?</p>
<p>For many, the accumulation of facts about ecological disruption seems to have a narcotising effect, all too apparent in popular attitudes to the crisis of the Earth system, and especially among opinion-makers and political leaders. A few have opened themselves to the full meaning of the Anthropocene, crossing a threshold by way of a gradual but ever-more disturbing process of evidence assimilation or, in some cases, after a realisation that breaks over them suddenly and with great force in response to an event or piece of information in itself quite small.</p>
<p>Beyond the science, the few alert to the plight of the Earth sense that something unfathomably great is taking place, conscious that we face a struggle between ruin and the possibility of some kind of salvation.</p>
<p>So today the greatest tragedy is the absence of a sense of the tragedy. The indifference of most to the Earth system’s disturbance may be attributed to a failure of reason or psychological weaknesses; but these seem inadequate to explain why we find ourselves on the edge of the abyss.</p>
<p>How can we understand the miserable failure of contemporary thinking to come to grips with what now confronts us? A few years after the second atomic bomb was dropped, Kazuo Ishiguro wrote a novel about the people of Nagasaki, a novel in which the bomb is never mentioned yet whose shadow falls over everyone. The Anthropocene’s shadow too falls over all of us.</p>
<p>Yet the bookshops are regularly replenished with tomes about world futures from our leading intellectuals of left and right in which the ecological crisis is barely mentioned. They write about the rise of China, clashing civilizations and machines that take over the world, composed and put forward as if climate scientists do not exist. They prognosticate about a future from which the dominant facts have been expunged, futurologists trapped in an obsolete past. It is the great silence.</p>
<p>I heard of a dinner party during which one of Europe’s most eminent psychoanalysts held forth ardently on every topic but fell mute when climate change was raised. He had nothing to say. For most of the intelligentsia, it is as if the projections of Earth scientists are so preposterous they can safely be ignored.</p>
<p>Perhaps the intellectual surrender is so complete because the forces we hoped would make the world a more civilised place – personal freedoms, democracy, material advance, technological power – are in truth paving the way to its destruction. The powers we most trusted have betrayed us; that which we believed would save us now threatens to devour us.</p>
<p>For some, the tension is resolved by rejecting the evidence, which is to say, by discarding the Enlightenment. For others, the response is to denigrate calls to heed the danger as a loss of faith in humanity, as if anguish for the Earth were a romantic illusion or superstitious regression.</p>
<p>Yet the Earth scientists continue to haunt us, following us around like wailing apparitions while we hurry on with our lives, turning around occasionally with irritation to hold up the crucifix of Progress. </p>
<p>(This is an edited extract from Clive Hamilton’s <em>Defiant Earth: The fate of humans in the Anthropocene</em>, published last week. The extract was first published in the <em>Guardian</em>. )</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/77296/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
After 200,000 years of modern humans on a 4.5 billion-year-old Earth, we have arrived at new point in history: the Anthropocene. The change has come upon us with disorienting speed. It is the kind of shift…Clive Hamilton, Professor of Public Ethics, Centre For Applied Philosophy & Public Ethics (CAPPE), Charles Sturt UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/764042017-04-19T07:12:51Z2017-04-19T07:12:51ZThe Real Spartacus: or What is Philosophy as a Way of Life?<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/165795/original/image-20170419-6360-n6nzy8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=496&amp;fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Andy Whitfield as Spartacus</span> </figcaption></figure><p>Legend tells that when the Romans defeated the slave revolt led by the gladiator Spartacus in 71 BCE, they searched in vain for the real Spartacus. Every captive proclaimed “I am Spartacus”, in a sublime gesture of solidarity. </p>
<p>Whatever the truth of the story, you are unlikely to learn much about it by watching the 2010-2013 Starz series Spartacus which dramatizes the Thracian slave-come-gladiator’s epic story. </p>
<p>“Dramatizes” is not quite the word for this bazaar of Blood and Sand in which almost everyone parades around in next to nothing and blood spurts fantastically out of punctured bodies in every episode.</p>
<p>The Romans in Spartacus are all craven figures: manipulative and power-crazed or decadently debauched. The ethic of the gladiators is a kind of grim Stoicism, as this ancient philosophy is usually understood: one of joylessly facing down adversity, buoyed only by the hopeless hope of “glory in the arena”.</p>
<p>In many ways, however, the real story of the series Spartacus unfolded off-screen. It surrounds the real man cast to play the hero. This story is told in the extraordinary documentary: “<a href="http://www.beherenowfilm.com/">Be Here Now: the Andy Whitfield Story</a>”.</p>
<p>In 2010, Whitfield was a young man with everything to look forward to. Happily married, a father of two beautiful children, his casting as Spartacus had propelled him to fame and fortune.</p>
<p>In March 2010, however, after the first season of the hit series, Whitfield was diagnosed with <a href="www.leukaemia.org.au/Lymphoma/Non-Hodgkin%E2%80%8E">non-Hodgkin lymphoma</a>. Initial treatment indicated remission. A September 2010 medical check-up indicated that the disease had returned, now in different places. </p>
<p>Twelve months later, Whitfield would be dead.</p>
<h2>“Be Here Now”</h2>
<p>“<a href="www.beherenowfilm.com/">Be Here Now</a>” documents Whitfield’s battle with the disease between March 2010 and September 2011. Drawn from interviews with Andy and his wife Vashti, viewers are invited by the film into their home and their struggle to come to terms with the havoc the actor’s cancer was dealing to Andy’s body and to his life.</p>
<p>Andy travels to India to a retreat; spends time with his father. He undertakes, in total, some eleven rounds of chemotherapy, and one bout of radiography: exhausting every possible therapeutic avenue. As each round of treatment raises hopes of remission, and each round of news disappoints those hopes, we watch Andy and Vashti responding, and finally conceding to the inevitable.</p>
<p>The title of “Be Here Now” comes from a reminder Whitfield sported on his arm, reflecting what we might call his personal philosophy. This philosophy, never explicitly discussed, was evidently very deeply influenced by Buddhism—as well as by the profound strength and support of the love of his life. </p>
<p>At one point, explaining why he is not raging at his fate, Whitfield explains simply that there are two ways he could respond. One was through hatred and anger: the bread and butter of Spartacus: Blood and Sand. The other was through compassion and acceptance. </p>
<p>What makes “Be Here Now” such a powerful watch is the almost supererogatory courage, equanimity and grace Whitfield displayed in the final months of his too-brief life. Even after all medical options had been exhausted and his death became imminent, Andy’s actions bespeak very clearly which choice he had made.</p>
<p>They also advertise for all who see the film the merits of its informing philosophy.</p>
<h2>To philosophise, to learn how to die?</h2>
<p>The classical philosopher Plato claimed in his <a href="https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/p/plato/p71pho/">Phaedo</a> that to philosophise is to learn how to die. “Be Here Now” is as good an example of what this philosophical paradox might mean as we can offer to our students.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/165797/original/image-20170419-6380-kr3tko.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=754&amp;fit=clip">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Fragments of Plato’s Phaedo.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Reflecting Plato’s paradox, considerable interest was taken in the ancient “doxographic literature” in the deaths and last words of ancient philosophers. These final deeds and words were felt to display the real measure of their philosophies as shaping what Socrates called “<a href="https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/p/plato/p71ap/complete.html">examined lives</a>”.</p>
<p>It was for instance in very large measure for the serenity that they displayed in their last hours that the Roman Senator-turned-rebel Cato, and before him <a href="https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/p/plato/p71ap/complete.html">Socrates</a>, were eulogised by subsequent writers as sages, truly wise or enlightened men:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our ways—I to die, and you to live. Which is better only God knows.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Andy Whitfield knew for at least three months that, at age 39, he was going very soon to pass away. In one scene, recorded soon after the final medical news is delivered to him and Vashti, Andy tells us that he has been learning to sit with this awareness, and come to a peace with it. </p>
<p>He even reports feeling selfish to the extent that he has achieved this peace, knowing that his children will miss their father, and his wife her best friend and husband.</p>
<p>Asked by his distraught children on his deathbed what was happening, Whitfield responded with a sage-like magnanimity little beneath that of a Socrates: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>I am going to go to sleep now as my body won’t work any more. I am like a butterfly with broken wings. I will always be with you and will always be watching over you. I love you.</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>Be Here Now</h2>
<p>“All of this is admirable,” some readers will say. “But none of it is philosophical.” In one sense of the word, of course, this objection is true. For the idea of philosophy at stake in a documentary like “Be Here Now” will not write you papers, in the best journals, win promotions or accolades or references or citations or Professorial chairs. </p>
<p>Yet we can still say in modern English that Whitfield, truly, responded “philosophically” to what his fate delivered him. And this usage reflects one, much older sense of the Greek word <em>philosophia</em> than that or those confusedly used today. </p>
<p>“Philosophy is no trick to catch the public,” the Roman Stoic Seneca (first century CE) thus <a href="https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Moral_letters_to_Lucilius/Letter_16">wrote</a> a pupil: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>it is not devised for show. It is a matter, not of words, but of facts. It is not pursued in order that the day may yield some amusement before it is spent, or that our leisure may be relieved of a tedium that irks us. It moulds and constructs the soul; it orders our life, guides our conduct, shows us what we should do and what we should leave undone … Without it, no one can live fearlessly or in peace of mind. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Human beings are creatures who form beliefs about our lives and the world in which we live and die. Everyone above a certain age in this broad sense has a “philosophy of life”, which in turn shapes what they feel and do. </p>
<p>Even emotions like fear, anxiety or anger are shaped by these beliefs: “he has wronged me, so I am right to seek revenge”; “I am going to die, and this is bad, so I am right to feel fear”, etc. </p>
<p>But if we are thus what we believe, in no small measure, Stoicism and Epicureanism and the other ancient schools reasoned that philosophy can be a “guide for life.” For even in its institutional forms, philosophy is all about assessing people’s beliefs, with a view to potentially rectifying them in the light of reasoned reflection.</p>
<p>We can readily imagine the kinds of beliefs a person in Andy Whitfield’s situation could have formed, absent philosophical direction: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>What have I done to deserve this? Why did this happen to me, and not to others? And how much I am losing … how many years rightfully mine? … truly, this world is … little better than an arena in which gladiators kill and die for the others’ sport … etc.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Yet Whitfield’s own response was different. The maxim “Be Here Now” reflects a philosophical attitude to existence close to the heart of Buddhism, in the East, and to Stoicism in particular, in the West. This attitude asks us, on the basis of confronting philosophical reasoning, to put aside such all-too-human comparisons of what is, with what might be or could have been. For they are fatal to the ability to live completely whatever our particular fate happens to be:</p>
<blockquote>
<p><a href="http://www.forumromanum.org/literature/seneca_younger/brev_e.html">You will hear many men saying</a>: “After my fiftieth year I shall retire into leisure, my sixtieth year shall release me from public duties.” And what guarantee, pray, have you that your life will last longer? Who will suffer your course to be just as you plan it?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Marcus Aurelius, the Stoic philosopher-emperor of the late second century CE indeed penned a series of <a href="https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Meditations">meditations</a> in which he enjoins himself to, exactly, <em>be here now</em>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Do not disturb yourself by thinking of the whole of your life. Let not your thoughts at once embrace all the various troubles which you may expect to befall you: but on every occasion ask yourself: what is there in this which is intolerable and past bearing? … </p>
<p>If you should live three thousand years…, yet remember this, that no man loses any other life than that he now lives; and that he now lives no other life than what he is parting with, every instant …</p>
<p>If you separate from yourself the future and the past, and apply yourself exclusively to living the life that you are living—that is to say, the present—you can live all the time that remains to you until your death, in calm, benevolence, and serenity.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Stories like Whitfield’s, and Marcus’ very <em>repetitions</em> of such key Stoic meditations reflect that—however critics of this conception of philosophy paint it, superciliously, as facile—to attain such philosophical serenity is anything but easy. It may be amongst the more difficult things you can achieve:</p>
<p>“<a href="https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Ethics_(Spinoza)/Part_5">But all things excellent are as difficult as they are rare</a>.” </p>
<h2>The real Spartacus</h2>
<p>There are real intellectual risks that attend East-West comparisons in philosophy, as in other disciplines. Yet even <a href="http://www.iep.utm.edu/hadot/">Pierre Hadot</a>, the philologist-turned-philosopher famous for re-emphasing the often-forgotten existential dimension of classical philosophy, at the end of his life begrudgingly admitted the extraordinary parallels between the kind of Buddhism which assisted Andy Whitfield in his final years, and ancient Stoic, sceptical and Epicurean ideas.</p>
<p>There seem to be a small number of “fundamental attitudes of reason” available to people from all cultures, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Philosophy-Way-Life-Spiritual-Exercises/dp/0631180338">Hadot</a> came to suppose. Different peoples and generations discover and rediscover these across time, faced with the same difficulties that attend finite human lives, independently of culture and “discourse”.</p>
<p>In one of the more powerful moments in “Be Here Now”, Vashti reminds her husband of how, before each scene in the Spartacus series, Andy would steel or rev himself up for the combat. He should now do the same thing, faced with even this news about his illness. </p>
<p>“Your job”, she tells him, is not—impossibly— to control what he cannot. It is to bear up well to whatever befalls him.<br>
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<span class="caption">Andy Whitfield with children, 2011.</span>
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<p>The <a href="https://dailystoic.com/epictetus/">Roman Stoic Epictetus</a> could not have said it better. Socrates, on trial for his life, <a href="http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0170%3Atext%3DApol.%3Asection%3D30a">protested that</a> all his philosophising had aimed at doing was turning the Athenians’ attention away from the pursuits of money, power and fame towards taking care, first of all, of their inner lives. </p>
<p>It is the same, blindingly simple yet deeply philosophical idea that explains why the ancient literature on the virtues of philosophical sages abounds in paradoxes: </p>
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<p>the sage is the only truly rich man; all of the sage’s actions are successful, even those that fail; virtue is the only good; everyone else except sages are slaves (if not gladiators) … </p>
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<p>In his poem explaining the Epicurean worldview, <a href="http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/carus-on-the-nature-of-things">On the Nature of Things</a>, the Roman philosopher-poet Lucretius begins each of the books with hymns to his teacher which condense this fundamental idea of “philosophy as a way of life”. </p>
<p>People worship the gods Ceres and Bacchus for the external bounties of grain and wine. Yet greater admiration is surely owed to any philosophy which ministers “tender consolations … which assuage the minds of men.”</p>
<p>Most people worship heroes like Hercules, or the Spartacus depicted for adolescents in series like Spartacus: Blood and Sand, for their great bodily strength and feats: </p>
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<p>However, unless our hearts are purified, what battles and dangers must then insinuate themselves in us, against our will! What bitter cares then tear men disturbed by passion! What other fears do just the same! </p>
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<p>“Be Here Now”, in this ancient light, gives a very different kind of answer to the Romans’ question: <em>who is the real Spartacus?</em>, or where you might find him.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/76404/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<h4 class="double-bordered">Disclosure</h4><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Matthew Sharpe works at Deakin. He is part of an ARC project on modern engagements with Philosophy as a Way of Life</span></em></p>The real struggle, and victory, of Spartacus star Andy Whitfield was not in a computer-generated arena.Matthew Sharpe, Associate Professor in Philosophy, Deakin UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/760172017-04-11T00:00:26Z2017-04-11T00:00:26ZJohn Clarke: an unsurpassed craftsman of the Australasian voice<p>There are some writers whose voice, by sheer accident of timing in your life, reach far deeper into your brain than the specifics of what they wrote.</p>
<p>For me, it was the satirist and actor John Clarke, <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-04-10/john-clarke-dies-aged-68/8430174">who died suddenly on Sunday</a> while hiking in the Grampians, aged 68. I never met Clarke. But he taught me a great deal about the English language and the Australasian voice, and what can be done with both.</p>
<p>Clarke was a transplanted New Zealander who became an essential Australian presence. As a young man he’d <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/sundayextra/john-clarke-on-the-year-that-made-him-1967/7629488">swapped the shearing shed for university</a> without ever losing his clear affection for both worlds. That sums up the sense of duality in Clarke’s persona, firmly at home yet ever so slightly removed from the absurdity around him.</p>
<p>The ideal posture for the satirist, in other words. And his facility with language was wholly unrivalled in Australian satire.</p>
<p>One of my earliest comedy memories was my parents’ copy of <em>The Fred Dagg Tapes</em>. I had no idea who <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5L_dA1Mv-Q">Whitlam</a> or <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OLzBMcwwFkU">Kerr</a> were, but I hung on every word. You have to. You cannot listen to Clarke even at his most seemingly flippant without sensing the incredible precision of the word choices and the careful elegance with which his sentences are <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-04-10/jonathan-green-pays-tribute-to-john-clarke/8431088">shaped and finessed</a>. Every flourish and detour, every wry circumlocution, is perfectly formed and placed.</p>
<p>In that craftsmanship lies the unnerving durability of Clarke’s work. So much of early 1980s Australia seems impossibly alien now, yet Fred Dagg’s musings on real estate could have been written yesterday:</p>
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<p>You can’t write like that anymore. The media that services our Twitter-addled attention spans won’t reward phrases like “probably isn’t going to glisten with rectitude” or “why you would want to depart too radically from the constraints laid down for us by the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17NKos-7GCo">conventional calibration of distance</a>?,” or writing insider send-ups of literature (“the stark hostility of the land itself - I’m sorry, the stark hostility of the <em>very</em> land itself”) or entire books <a href="https://www.textpublishing.com.au/books/the-even-more-complete-book-of-australian-verse">parodying major poets</a> with perfect pitch. </p>
<p>Clarke could invite his reader into jokes about Samuel Richardson (“he’s probably dead now, he was a very old man when I knew him”) or <a href="http://mrjohnclarke.com/projects/the-tournament">Ibsen and Monet playing tennis</a>
without a trace of pretension or smugness. His <a href="https://meanjin.com.au/memoir/commonplace-3/">Commonplace</a> pieces for <em>Meanjin</em> reveal a remarkable racconteur with an obvious curiosity for people and places. Above all, his work is shot through with an unflagging affection for language itself. And, in deference to the fact this is supposed to be a philosophy column, we should note his unique take on Socratic Paradox:</p>
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<p>To call what Clarke did sarcasm seems at once too crude and too weak. It’s a dryness beyond sarcasm. To work at all, irony has to find a way to signal the speaker’s ironic distance from what they’re saying. The question is how you do it. Sarcasm screams it at you; subtler irony gives you a knowing wink. Clarke doesn’t have to wink. It’s there already, something at the top of the throat, in the posture, in something the forehead’s doing. A near-total irony perfect for dissecting the deadly serious. </p>
<p>Clarke’s was a voice that was Australasian in the best sense: refusing self-importance but finding a deep earnestness in taking the piss.</p>
<p>He didn’t do impressions or voices, he just did <em>his</em> voice. It didn’t matter who he was meant to be: the voice sounded right. It sounded right as any politician you care to mention, it sounded right as <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0131400/">Wal Footrot</a>, and it sounded right as the conniving developer in <em><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0291832/">Crackerjack</a></em>. </p>
<p>It was a finely-tuned instrument in <em><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0165024/?ref_=fn_al_tt_2">The Games</a></em>. In a country that lurches alarmingly between cultural cringe and shallow triumphalism, <em>The Games</em> hit the sweet spot in the national neuroses in a way that’s unlikely ever to be repeated. </p>
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<p>And it was never better than when he and Bryan Dawe deftly unweaved the tortured logic of the week with paradoxically brutal restraint. <em>Clarke and Dawe</em> was a masterpiece precisely because two middle-aged men in unremarkable suits against a black background, not even attempting an impression or costume, made a space where the latest absurdity could be made to disassemble itself in front of us.</p>
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<p>Urgency in wryness. Bemused ferocity. We so dearly need voices like that, but we’ve just lost the best we had. </p>
<p>Vale Mr Clarke. We’ll not see your like again.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/76017/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
I never met John Clarke, who has just died at 68. Yet he taught me a great deal about the English language and the Australasian voice, and what can be done with both.Patrick Stokes, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy, Deakin UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.